Integrated Web

How Web services are changing the Internet: "Last week, .. Amazon followed in Google's footsteps by releasing a set of "Web services." Web services were supposed to be the next big thing: They'd let you check your mail with your toaster, wash your car using your cell phone, and so forth. Now we're finally seeing Web services, and it's starting to look like they really will change the Internet. But despite all the hype, you probably still don't know what a Web service is. It's a fairly simple piece of technology. In essence, a Web service is just a special type of Web page, but instead of being formatted prettily for the human eye, the page is formatted for a computer to read. The technology makes it easy for some Web site developers (like Amazon's) to produce such a page and for other developers (like me) to retrieve the information therein. Suddenly any Web site (including yours) can display up-to-the-minute information ..."