Web Services Question:

Yes and no. The SOAP and WSDL standards are relatively new, but the idea of sending messages between programs over a network has been around for decades. Past efforts to create network-oriented distributed object frameworks like CORBA, DCOM, and Java RMI haven't gone to waste. While creating these tools, the computer science and application development communities discovered and learned important information about how to
build widely distributed systems. In the words of Tim Bray, co-editor of the XML 1.0 spec:
SOAP has the advantages that it's simpler and easier to implement than any existing alternative, and makes better use of the pervasive Web
infrastructure. The effect is that you can pull a system together using SOAP in weeks, not quarters. Obviously, the alternatives offer richer feature sets, particularly in the area of transaction semantics, security, and so on, but at a dramatically higher cost. SOAP will not sweep all before it; but it will be very widely deployed across the Internet and the intranets of this world.