Simplistic understanding on what web services really are

Web Services

Web service is a technology to connect services. The technology in the web services is used to make the connection between the services.Web services are client and server applications that communicate over the World Wide Web’s HTTP. As described by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), web services provide a standard means of interoperating between software applications running on a variety of platforms and frameworks.Web services are characterized by their great interoperability and extensibility. Web services can be combined in a loosely coupled way to achieve complex operations. Programs providing simple services can interact with each other to deliver sophisticated added-value services. 

The primary key elements of the web services are as 

• Repository 

• Messaging 

• Service 

    

                           

Types of Web Services 

• SOAP

• REST

• JSON

SOAP 

The SOAP stands for Simple Object Access protocol developed by Microsoft .It is a protocol for exchanging the structured information in the implementation of the web service. The Soap introduces extensibility, neutrality and independence .In the soap service the XML is used as the messaging language with reliance of web protocol of HTTP or SMTP .It is more rigid kind of messaging pattern due to the rules in place which are required for standardization. Soap can be used across  platforms like windows , Linux etc…

                                                              

Soap Body 

REST 

Also referred as a RESTful web service -- is based on representational state transfer (REST) technology, an architectural style and approach to communications often used in web services development.it is a resource based.It is based on client-server architecture In a RESTful Web service, requests made to a resource's URI will return a response that may be in XML, HTML, JSON or some other defined format. 

                      

The response may confirm that some alteration has been made to the stored resource, and it may provide hypertext links to other related resources or collections of resources. Using HTTP, as is most common, the kind of operations available include those predefined by the HTTP verbs GET, POST, PUT, DELETE and so on. Each message is self-descriptive as the server here is stateless By making use of a stateless protocol and standard operations, REST systems aim for fast performance, reliability, and the ability to grow, by re-using components that can be managed and updated without affecting the system as a whole, even while it is running.

JSON

Json is referred as JavaScript object notation. Unlike the Soap and Rest service which uses XML as the messaging pattern, the JSON uses a subset of Javascript 

   

                     

The Request-Response JSON pattern is very similar to that of SOAP based web services in Application-server. The web service is implemented using a program in Application-server. The program has input and output data formats, described using language structures and Application- server is responsible for transforming incoming JSON messages into application data, and linking to the application. The application returns output data back to Application-server, and server transforms this into JSON data to return to the client.