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15. Using Web Services¶

Once it became easy to retrieve documents and parse documents over HTTP using programs, it did not take long to develop an approach where we started producing documents that were specifically designed to be consumed by other programs (i.e., not HTML to be displayed in a browser).

There are two common formats that we use when exchanging data across the web. eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has been in use for a very long time and is best suited for exchanging document-style data. When programs just want to exchange dictionaries, lists, or other internal information with each other, they use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) (see www.json.org). We will look at both formats.

Using Web Services