Web Services
What is “Web Services”?
“Web Services” (also called Application Services) are just an API (application programming interfaces) that can be accessed over a network, like: Internet, and executed on a remote system hosting the requested services. Web services are a new kind of Web application which are simple, independent, self-describing, modular applications that can be published, located, and invoked across the Web. Web services perform functions, which can be anything from simple requests to complicated business processes. Once a Web service is deployed, other applications (and other Web services) can discover and invoke the deployed service
“Web Service” as per W3C: web service refers to clients and servers that communicate over the HTTP protocol used on the Web. This can be of two types : Big Web Services and RESTful Web Services.
“Big Web Services” use Extensible Markup Language (XML) messages that follow the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) standard and have been popular with traditional enterprise. In such systems, there is often a machine-readable description of the operations offered by the service written in the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). The latter is not a requirement of a SOAP endpoint, but it is a prerequisite for automated client-side code generation in many Java and .NET SOAP frameworks.
Web services are a set of tools. Web Service can be used in 3 ways, these styles are Remote procedure calls (RPC), Service-oriented architecture (SOA), Representational state transfer (REST).
