what is web servce ?

Posted on 2011-09-29
Last Modified: 2012-08-13
what is web servce ?
what purpose it can use at ?
how to clear understand without difficulty ?

Question by:tamilsoft
LVL 25

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by:Luis Pérez
Luis Pérez earned 150 total points
ID: 36815906
I'll try to give you the more simple information.

You use Visual Studio (or WebMatrix or something else) and to create web sites. Your web site contains .aspx pages; those .aspx pages are called by browsers and render as HTML code to the browser that calls them. Normally, the .aspx pages provides an user interface.

Web services are a different type of component in your web site. As well as you can provide pages in your site, you can also provide web services. Think in web services as they were "functions" that you can call (event passing parameters) from outside your web (you can call it from another web site, or from a Windows application... or from somewhere else) and they return XML.

So imagine that you work in a big weather company. Your company has a great website (made in providing weather information. But the web site can also contain a web service that, when called -for example passing a postal code as a parameter- returns (in XML) information about the weather in that postal code. You can sell this information to another companies that want to show weather information in their web sites.

A web site can contain many web services (many "functions"), the same way it contains many pages. Even you can create a web site without pages, only web services.

Your web service will provide a public URL (for example, "") for calling it. Of course, you can deal with complex classes for parameters as well as for output results, because .Net built-in serialization capabilities can transform those complex classes in XML.

I hope now it's clear to you.

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THBA earned 200 total points
ID: 36815999

It is just a web service written in ASP.NET (like c#, Visual Basic .NET, etc...)
Web Service can also be written in Java, php, and other languages.

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dannocracker earned 50 total points
ID: 36816195
A web service provides functionality without a UI. It provides data or behavior that other apps request. The web server provide http protocol access to it but the payload is usually a xml message standard format such as SOAP.
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by:Kaushal Arora
Kaushal Arora earned 50 total points
ID: 36816224

Accepted Solution

THBA earned 200 total points
ID: 36857297
Just think of a web service like a public library of functions accessible from a web server.  Normally, if you have a console application,  You can use someone else's functions (from their library) to query a database. So, another team member can write a function called GetTotalSales(companyID). They put the function in a dll. You include the dll as part of your reference in Visual Studio. You can now call the function GetTotalSales.

Let's say, you are writing a page on your company website.  The other team member can put that function on a webserver and make it a web service. That way, they do not have to distribute the dll. If they need to make a change to the function, they change it on the web server. Your application (using Visual Studio, you have a web service as a reference) calls the function the web service.  The main advantage of a web service is that  there is no need to re-distribute the library to everyonewho's using your functions -- especially after a change to the function.  

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anandblitz earned 50 total points
ID: 36890180

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