Web Services-Basic

In this article we will discuss about the basics of web services,then later on we will move to
types of web services and their details.But Before reading this post i strongly recommend to
read my previous post about SOA(Service Oriented Architectur) as web services are mainly
based on SOA Principle.
Web Services are self-contained, modular, distributed, dynamic applications that can be
described, published, located, or invoked over the network to create products, processes,
and supply chains. These applications can be local, distributed, or Web-based. Web
services are built on top of open standards such as TCP/IP, HTTP, Java, HTML, and
XML.
If you find it tough to understand the above lines then dont worry ,you can understand
everything gradually as you go on.
Simply we can say that A web service is thus a distributed application based on the
principle of SOA ,whose components can be deployed and executed on distinct devices.

[EMPLOYEE SERVICE APPLICATION]

In the above diagram it is very clear that the EMPLOYEE SERVICE defines 4 different types
of services .Once we see the above diagram ,the below questions will be arising.

Who writes the web services ?

What are the above servies ?

Where they will be deployed ?

Who calls them ?

Once we can answer the above questions we can understand the basics of web services.Lets
answer these questions one by one.
Each of the above services are like one API which is meant for a different purpose.Each API
will be calling internally some business logic,performing some validation and finally will be
returning some results.Thats how these services work.These services are developed by the
Web services designers and are usually deployed in any application server and are exposed to
the clients for their use.The clients can directly use them through any programming stub or
can use any GUI tool which will be internally calling these services.Clients can be from any
other programming languages. To call these APIs the clients must know the addresses of the
services where they are hosted.These web services either can be hosted publicly so that you
can access them over internet or can be hosted privately specific to any organization.
Web service is roughly divided into two groups SOAP-based and REST-style.
SOAP(Simple Object Access Protocol) Web Service:Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a standard protocol specification for message
exchange based on XML. Communication between the web service and client happens using XML
messages. SOAP defines the rules for communication like what are all the tags that should be
used in XML and their meaning.
RESTful Web Service:RESTful web service uses architectures that use HTTP or similar protocols by restricting the
interface to use standard operations like GET, POST, PUT, DELETE for HTTP. Though RESTful
is easy to develope still its not that much matured like its counterpart SOAP.
In the Next section we will deal with some terminologies specific to web service.To
understand web service understanding those basic terms is very important.