Teaching Web Services with Water

Web services have become important enough that all software professionals should know something about them. However, it can be challenging to fit Web services into a crowded curriculum. Common approaches require teaching a host of standards and APIs that all but obscure the simplicity of the concepts. The object-oriented Water language offers a way around these difficulties. Originally designed for rapidly prototyping XML-based Web services, it provides a very concise encoding of Web-services functionality. This makes it ideal for teaching, as students can learn to write real Web-services programs in two or three weeks. Moreover, Water helps students learn several patterns that are important to understanding object-oriented design but lacking - or not implemented well - in common o-o languages such as Java and C++. Among these are delegation and multiple inheritance.