I have never played with web services api. That looks like a C++ api.
My basic take on web services, is its like DCOM (distributed com over network),
but instead of a binary RPC protocol, they are instead doing everything using
a web sever, HTTP, and putting the data into XML format as they shuttle it around.
So maybe a more readable form of DCOM extended to more implementations and
platforms, not just requiring complex MS technologies, but at the cost of bloating
the representation of the data way up, and shoe horn-ing it into an existing web
protocol.
The current COM code does not support DCOM. in vb CreateObject actually takes two
arguments, the second being an optional server name to contact that hosts the object.
I have never done any work with DCOM.
It looks like a web services api could be done just in a standard extension, no COM
required.