This blog is helpful for beginners and professionals providing basic to advanced level knowledge on Web services such as SOAP, RESTFUL, protocols and Java Web services JAX-RS and JAX-WS. It doesn’t require any prior knowledge on protocols or TCP/IP requests etc.
What is a Web service?
The basic idea behind the web services is to communicate one programming language to another programming language. For example, web service can be written in C and the application which is written in Java can utilize this service. This is known as Interoperability.
A collection of open protocols and standards used for exchange of data between two different applications is called web service and this is available online. In another way, a web service is software component which can be used to connect two different platforms over the internet by using XML messaging services. XML is used to encode all communications to a web service. It is a client server application for communication purpose.
As per the above we can define web service like below
- It is software component for communication purpose
- Two different platforms can be connected by using the web service.
- Collection of standard protocols which can be used to exchange data between two devices or platforms via online.
Web services are web-based applications which can create supply chain process and products over the internet. Web services are placed on the top of TCP/IP, HTTP, XML, HTML and Java. Web services are used XML to interchange the information that use the internet for direct application to application interaction.
For the above diagram, if you can observe Web service is the placed in the middle of all applications and applications can access web service to communicate other application.
The basic web service is combination of XML and HTTP. SOAP, UDDI, WSDL are the components of web services.
In modern business world most of the business applications are web-based applications for easy access. These application developed by using different technologies like java, .net, angular js, python etc.. In any of these developed application needs any sort of communication to another application which is built in different language it is difficult. In order to avoid the difficulty to communicate other language applications web services are introduced. Web services provide a common platform that allows multiple applications built on various programming languages to have the ability to communicate with each other.
There are two types of Web services
- SOAP web service
- RestFul Web service