Oisin Hurley

Recently I have fielded questions from customers like, "Which is better, peer-to-peer or Web services?" and "Do you think I should move from Web services to a peer-to-peer network?". The answer is another question: "Which approach best suits your solution?". This tends to make the customer think about system requirements a little more, so that once an interaction model is better defined a more informed choice can be made. This article provides a solution developer with some of the facts about both P2P and Web services so they can make that informed implementation decision. Web Services Most of the current solutions under the title of Web services have a number of elements that are common to their construction. For communication, they use XML to format their messages and deliver them over HTTP. If an interface language is required, another XML syntax called WSDL is use... (more)