Web service

A web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over a computer network.

Description

It is a software function provided at a network address over the World Wide Web, with the service always on, as in the concept of utility computing.

The W3C defines a Web service generally as:

A software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network.

The W3C Web Services Architecture Working Group defined a Web Services Architecture, requiring a specific implementation of a "Web service."

[a Web service] has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards.

The W3C also states that "we can identify two major classes of Web services":

• REST-compliant Web services, in which the primary purpose of the service is to manipulate representations of Web resources using a uniform set of stateless operations.

• Arbitrary Web services, in which the service may expose an arbitrary set of operations.

Ajax

Ajax is a group of interrelated Web development techniques used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications, which may request data from web services.

See also

• Ajax (programming)
• Amazon Web Services
• Cloud computing
• JSON
• Representational state transfer
• SOAP
• Software architecture
• Software as a service
• Utility computing
• Web Services Description Language
• XML

External links

• Web service @ Wikipedia