I'm not really sure I see the difference. One of the first things done is to wrap all the calls to the webservice in some kind of API (often using a pre-existin

I'm not really sure I see the difference. One of the first things done is to wrap all the calls to the webservice in some kind of API (often using a pre-existing library), which puts you back exactly where you were with calling a function which happens to make a web request.