Introduction to Web Services is itself is a wide topic. After spending time on reading or watching the introduction of Web Service you might have observed that you are already aware of this things. But sometimes you get something new which is not covered in other introduction videos or posts. You may feel the same way for my below posts, but do not forget to mention your thoughts and impression on this post in comment section.
What is Web Service?
Let’s start our discussion with the definition of Web Service available on Wikipedia
“A Web service is a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the World Wide Web.”
From this definition we can see, Web Service is a service which can build communication in two different system using standard www technology, here standard www technology means HTTP. Two software build up using two different programming languages can communicate with each other using HTTP protocol and Web Service. Basically, HTTP is built for human to machine communication, but here in Web Service concept, HTTP is used for machine to machine communication for transferring machine rid able file formats like JSON and XML.
The Need of Web Service?
In today’s world, many big organizations are functioning with the help of hundreds of different software, server, technology, platform and applications. Top of that all this configuration should be compatible enough to communicate with each other, to utilize the full strength of IT innovation in real business. Here we can see the need for Web Services.
How can Web Service benefit us?
- Provides Interoperability within different systems.
- Any application using web using the web browser can take benefit of Web Services.
- Web services push web application at next level.
- With the help of Web Service, you can publish your functionality to the rest of world.
- XML is prime responsible for your data transfer over the open protocols.
- Increases the re usability of application.
- Take advantage of existing software’s
- Web services provide the way to link the data between two different software applications.
- Web services used to exchange data between different platforms.
How Web Service Works?
UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration): To discover, reuse and manage the service across the company, the organization uses UDDI.
Service Provide: Application who wish to publish their functionality to the world using web service.
Service Consumer: Application who want to use the functionality developed by the service provider.
WSDL (Web Service Description Language) : As name indicates, it describe the all the necessary information about web service like, functionality provided by web service, location of web service where it is hosted, like more.
