Sam Gentile says very few shops care about Web Services in real usage. I hope I'm not the only one.

I'm developing a web service that allows creation of orders, porting the classic order and order items objects you learn about when teaching yourself OOP. Customers create an order via the web service, which returns a unique order ID and then they can call the AddItem method. Alternatively, if I can figure it out, they will be able to pass in a complete XML order document. The order ID is then passed to branded payment pages, and I process payment. I need to know the contents of the order, as well as payment status so I can issue Windows Media DRM licenses.

Why use web services? Because they were easy. Clients themselves are not making full use of SOAP though, avoiding using the funky WDSL and remote object goodies, they simply use form puts, but the facility is there once they feel like being more trendy.

Developing the credit card and alternative payment methods makes me want to cry. ClearCommerce's credit card processing engine is old fashioned. You only get Java objects and C source code (where's .net support people?). So I'm left with submitting XML documents (lots of samples, no DTDs) to a remote web server. This would so easily be ported to a Web Service. I'm working on getting the permium rate telephone number guys to offer a Web Service, they seem pretty keen after I spent 2 hours chatting to their chief geek.

Just for fun we're also looking at web services internally to act as a load balancing mechanism without the stress of DCOM, but that's version 2.