Thread: Creating A Webservice

I was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction for tutorials or something on how to create a webservice of some sort.

Something like this: default
Where using the following parameterized url returns a simple xml result: http://www.webservicex.net/airport.a...irportCode=ATL

Basically, I have a web host that is supporting a database. Due to restrictions from the web host, the database can only be accessed using localhost (or in other words, can only be accessed on the server-side). I have an embedded client-side app which I would like to have access to that database. I was hoping a webservice would solve this problem for me (stop me here if I am wrong).
Based on user input, I would query the webservice (or one of several webservices) to retrieve small bits of data from the database.

Simple enough, but I have absolutely no idea how to actually create a webservice, and I have not been able to really find anything helpful online.
Any suggestions?

Sounds like you are looking to create a RESTful web API. Google this term and you should be able to find a wealth of information. Creating a simple REST service is not all that hard - take the query string from the given URL and do something with it, and output the results in some type of format (xml, JSON, text, etc...). As with anything though, it can get vastly complex with larger systems.