What are the advantages of Web services?
Web services can be described as applications that expose their functionality through the Internet. This functionality allows virtually any application to either expose or consume application services that can perform a variety of tasks.
By using Web services, your web application can benefit from enhanced functionality.
For example, a Web service may perform the task of verifying a customer's address. An ASP.NET application could capture a customer’s order through a Web form and send it toan address validation Web service. By passing the Web Service a customer's address, a response can be generated that indicates whether the address is valid and follows postal regulations.
Another type of web service can expose real-time real estate, job or product listings. An example of which is Google's Base data web service, which allows users to query for, insert, update, and delete items and listings in Google Base, making them available to millions of web sites.
There is no limit to the different types of Web services that can be developed for use today.
With Web services, your ecommerce website could get real time shipping rates from the USPS, UPS or Fedex, track packages and much more.
Web services are typically implemented as an application programming interfaces(API) via Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and executed on a remote system.
Web API is a development in web services, where the emphasis has been moving away from SOAP based services towards REST based communications.
Contact us to learn more about implementing the powerful functionality of Web services for your custom web development.