Updated May 29, 2023
Introduction to Types of Web Services
In this article, we will discuss the Types of Web Services. The most crucial web service is REST and SOAP. Some well-known web services that use markup languages are Web Template, JSON-WSP, JSON-RPC, WSDL, WSCL, WSFL, WS-Metadata Exchange, and XINS.
Worldwide, people extensively use REST and SOAP as the two popular types of web services. REST means Representational State Transfer and SOAP means Simple Object Access Protocol. SOAP is completely a protocol; meanwhile, REST is an architectural style. SOAP can’t use REST as a protocol, whereas REST can use SOAP web services because it is a concept. SOAP uses service interfaces to expose business logic, whereas REST uses URI to expose business logic.
What is Web Service?
A web service is a consistent medium to help in the efficient communication between a client and a server application over the network. It is a software module specifically designed to perform a set of tasks. The client requests the server to invoke a series of web services, and in response, the server hosts the web services. The requests are made using remote procedure calls (RPC). The most important element of a web service is the transfer between the client and the server in the .xml format. Many programming languages clearly understand this format. Precisely, applications (though written in different programming languages) communicate with each other in XML. Therefore it provides a common platform for programmers to coordinate and work.
Web Services offer many advantages, such as reducing the cost of communication, exposing business functionality on the network, utilizing a standardized protocol understood by everyone, building interoperability among various applications, and creating services for specific tasks. A web service has a service-oriented architecture and makes a combination of both internal and external services to any organization. It is capable of producing and providing the required service for the client.
Types of Web Services
At a technical level, web services can be implemented in different ways. Below mentioned are the two types of web services.
1. SOAP
People also know it as a transport-independent messaging protocol, and Microsoft originally developed it. It transfers XML data as SOAP messages. Each message has an XML document. The document follows a particular pattern. It uses HTML and SMTP for the transmission of messages. SOAP web services have a standard for security and address. Generating these values is hard-coded and doesn’t involve using a repository. SOAP features a built-in error-handling system. The responses to the requests contain error information which helps you to track and rectify the errors.
SOAP works very well when it is in distributed enterprise settings. It has the benefit of automation when used with a few language products. The only major drawback is that it uses WSDL (Web Services Description Language) to discover the service and has no alternative mechanism.
A SOAP message contains the following elements:
- An <Envelope> contains the message’s start and end. This is the root element. It includes the ‘header’ and the ‘body’.
- The header contains the attributes used to process the message.
- The body includes the XML data that needs to be sent out.
- A Fault that provides error messages when processing data.
2. REST
Representation State Transfer (REST) appeals to developers as it has a simpler interface than SOAP. It is an architectural style (each URL represents an individual object). It provides communication and connectivity between the devices and the internet for API-based tasks. REST allows different data formats like HTML, JSON, XML, etc. Compared to SOAP, it consumes less bandwidth and resources. You can write web services in any programming language and use them on any platform. It can also use SOAP web services, but SOAP cannot use REST web services.
REST web services provide flexibility to applications built with different programming languages and platforms to communicate efficiently. Now everything is consistently moving to the cloud. Developers design and implement all cloud-based architectures based on the principles of REST web services.
The key elements of REST implementation are:
- Resources: It commands the webserver to provide details that are demanded.
- Request Verbs: These describe whatever you want to do with the particular resource (demanded details)
- Request Headers: Additional instructions are sent with the request; they define the type of request required.
- Request Body: The Request Body contains the necessary details of the specific resource to be added to the server.
- Response Body: This is the main body of the response received.
- Response Status Codes: The web server returns these general codes and receives responses.
Architecture of Web Service
Every framework needs some architecture to ensure that the complete framework works or functions as desired. There are three distinct roles in the architecture of web services:
- Service Provider: The Provider is the one who creates the web service and makes it available to the client application who wants to use it for their specific purposes.
- Service Requestor: A client application is necessary to contact the web service. The client application, developed in .Net, Java, or any other programming language, searches for specific functionality through the web service.
- Service Broker: This is the application that provides access to the UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration), and this is what provides a repository on which the various WSDL files may be hosted.
All three elements of web services architecture help find, bind and publish the web service.
Conclusion
Modern web services have completely changed the digital scenario with evolving system integration and interoperability. They offer a level of functionality that is modern and also less complex. All this only comes to say that web services and their demand is multiplying with the growing digitalization in all the fields of commerce and business. We cannot take it for granted and must agree upon the relevance and importance of understanding technology’s functionality and uses.
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