Web services and cloud integration

Web services and online functionality is a core part of most applications today. Whether you are working with data downloaded from a central source, collaborating on documents stored online, or just looking to share your creation, this will probably be done via the internet. The core of most graphical toolkits and APIs are focused solely on the widgets—the presentation of the interface to the user. While this is due to various different reasons (and is evolving and expanding over time), it mostly reflects the period when they were created. Programming languages such as C and C++ underpin many of the native graphical toolkits (especially those targeting multiple platforms), and they pre-date cloud services and web-based APIs as we know them today. Powerful web services and standardized protocols for communications vastly improve the...