The old days of the client-server model might be here again. Vendors of hosted software are seeing a spike in their adoption rates. Microsoft is moving its software online as a service, something Oracle has been preaching for years. Sun's mantra has always been that the network is the computer. And there are tons of Web-services technologies that are continuing to facilitate the shift from standalone applications to a network-centric approach to computing.
A Web service is software that supports machine-to-machine interaction over a network, allowing applications written in various languages and running on various platforms to work with one another. Web services enable Windows and Linux applications to function together and exchange data, for example. Companies use Web services to tie together disparate functions and features on their Web sites, and their ranks include Amazon.com, eBay, Google, Yahoo, and PayPal.
