Re: Perl Webservices...whats it good for?

[gildir]

Fellow monk,

I think that similar question asks the majority of IT industry. For some people the answer is obvious, for some not. It's the same with every new technology ....

But the question you ask looks weird to me: "Why is SOAP better than using a webserver and LWP or some other alternative?" Web services (SOAP is just one building block of these) are in its essence something very different from web server. Web server's purpose to live is to serve HTTP objects (mostly HTML pages). On the other hand, web services are communication means between two computer systems. For example, SOAP messages can be transported by SMTP or plain TCP, not just HTTP.

You should look at web services as an alternative to RPC, CORBA or Messaging Oriented Middleware, not as an alternative to Web Server. It is like to consider SMTP e-mail to be alternative to TCP/IP.

These technologies are on different IT architecture layers.