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In our case, VMConnector WebServices offers a set of functions which sends or gets information from and to VirtueMart through the Internet. Web services can be reached through firewalls and proxies. It's a world wide spread technology and it's based on computing industry standards. IBM, Microsoft, Sun, and most of open source platforms supports these web services standards.
The main difference between our solution and most other solutions available on the market is the connectivity issues. VMConnector works through Internet / Intranet regular URLs (http - https://www...), this is mandatory as most ISPs (Internet Services Providers) does not allow TCP/IP and port connections with ODBC drivers.
As Joomla/VirtueMart are usually hosted on your ISP's servers and not within your own network, the only connectivity you get is through http/https protocol (URL addresses), and web services can connect through http/https.
A web service is an Internet component (program) accessible through Internet or Intranet (http & https). The component functions can be called through standard URLs (WSDL: interface), and the result (answer message) is formatted in XML using SOAP.
http: Hyper Text Transport Protocol URL: Unique Resource Locator (http://www.idtsa.com) WSDL: Web Service Definition Language XML: Extended Markup Language SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol 
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