Writing about Web services

I finally finished my book chapter on Web services. Like the rest of the book, the goal is to get beginners up to mid-level code monkeys. I have to admit that I've not done a ton of work with Web services, though I've consumed those provided by Amazon and Google for little projects, and written a few in various jobs that send and receive fairly concise objects. I'm comfortable in my knowledge, but there are a lot of people that know far more than I do, especially with regards to the underlying XML SOAP structure.

In researching the subject a little, I was surprised to see that you could mark the get and set of a property with the WebMethod attribute. I was not aware of that. I'm all for simulating an object-oriented approach to Web services, but wow is that a bad idea.

The funny thing is that the rest of the book spends so much time explaining how to exploit an object-oriented platform and here I am saying “keep it simple!” It's tough because here I am covering a topic in around 20 pages that some books cover in a thousand pages. I've been trying to ruthlessly keep my target audience in mind, but I'm always worried I'm leaving something out. It's like scope creep for authors!