Web Services Overview

Web services are software solutions that allow for interacting with machines residing on a network. In short, web services are nothing more than web pages for machines. They provide a standard way for a third party to request and receive data from a piece of hardware on the network without having to know anything about how that machine works. Other programs interact with the service through an interface defined by a WSDL (Web Services Description Language) file. This WSDL describes how to talk with the device and what should be expected back in response. Messages to and from the web service are formatted XML and while you need very little knowledge of XML to use the SUDS library, many times a web service will return a formatted XML string that you will have to parse through manually in order to make the data presentable.

In this section ...