Web Services: What is, Why Needed, How Works?

We all have heard of web services once if you are in IT or website development. If you look up to the Internet then you will find that it has several definitions and several uses. In simple words, we can say that it is an open standard based web applications that interact with other applications. Also, it can turn your current application into a web application. So here we will be discussing WHAT, WHY and HOW of web service.

What is a Web Service?

Web services are like an application that communicates with other application or web application with a standard XML messaging system. XML encodes communication of a web service with other. As all the communication is happening XML that makes it platform independent. Now JAVA can communicate with Perl or Unix with Windows. Web services are not dependent on what language another application is or on which OS it is running. Use of XML encoded communication made this happen here.

In other words from the Internet, we can say it is completely modular, distributed and dynamic application. When it is invoked, called or executed it creates products, supply chain and process. These web services are built on the top open standards as HTTP, IP, HTML, XML. A Web service uses the Internet as a medium of the conversation with another application. Web services create a communication line that serves as internal comm line of one system. A web service requires 3 basic elements for itself:

A. SOAP (Simple Access Object Protocol)

B. UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration)

C. WSDL (Web Service Description Language)

How does a Web Service Work?

As we have discussed that Web services use open standards like HTML, XML, SOAP to build a communication bridge between applications. For this it takes help of:

XML: It tags or encodes the data that need to be transferred between applications.

SOAP: It is a way to send the message from the client or provokers side.

WSDL: It let web service know that if the server is available or not.

So you can build a service based on the JAVA on editors. This service is easily accessible by the visual basic that run on windows. Also, you can make web services on C# on the Windows and call it on Linux based system. There will be no change in its objective or working module.

Why One Need Web Services?

When a web service is prepared, it becomes a unit of managed code. This code can be revoked by sending a request via the network. Once your service is exposed on the Internet other applications can start communicating with it.

Web services are used to makes applications independent of the language and applications. As we talked about it, it is a communication medium. Now a Java-based application talks to a Visual Basic-based application.

Web services use standardized standard web industry protocol. All the layer of the service uses well-defined protocols pf the services. This increases quality, choices and reduces the cost of the service.

Instead of using B2B/ EDI proprietary solutions for communication, it uses SOAP over HTTP. More cost effective and works well on the low-cost internet.

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