Web Services – Introduction

Today the Internet connectivity is increasing the day by day. Earlier the connectivity was limited only to the computers that were using same hardware and software technologies. But this limited functionality was insufficient to fulfill the ever-growing needs. So there was necessity of such kind of a system can allow inter platform communications, or I can say that the communications should be independent of the https://visualmodo.com/Operating Systems and Programming Languages. To address this issue the concept of web services was introduced.

A web service has list of methods and procedures that can be used by any of the applications irrespective of the programming languages, OS, hardware used to develop them. Any type of applications can access the functionality provided by the web service and such functionality is called web methods or web APIs.

A web service allows the communication via internet standards XML and HTTP.Thus I, can say that any computer that has an access to the internet can have access to the web service. Once the web service is deployed on the Internet it can be used by any of the clients using HTTP and XML. There can be a web service, which provide the details of any person based on its social security number. This service can be readily available to any clients who need to access it.

The fundamental requirements for a web service are listed as under.

A common format for data representation so that the communication or data exchange should be platform agnostic.
A standard specification for sending messages to web service and receiving responses from web services.
A standard format to describe a web service.
A standard for publishing and discovering web services enabling applications to access them.