ELI5: Web Services

Question

Can someone ELI5 to me Web Services? Looking for information based around what it is, why it is important, and how it is used (e.g. examples). Note, I'm not asking about 'Amazon Web Services' (unless they're exactly the same..).

Dipa Mehta · Answer

Hello pooja, In its most general sense, it's a web site intended to be read by other computers rather than by people. When you visit the Facebook web site, your browser requests pages and the server tells it what to display. The browser doesn't know what any of the words and pictures mean, it's just putting them where it's told to. When you use a Facebook app on your phone, the app makes requests to a web service instead. The server sends back the details of new things for your news feed, and the app decides how to display it. It understands that you were just tagged in two new photos, so it can show alerts and so on. EDIT: To give a simple example, if you visit /r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2o5o5j/eli5_web_services/ then you get this page. If you go to /r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2o5o5j/eli5_web_services/.json instead then you get the details of this post as JSON, which is what an app will probably use to display this post. It has just the text of the comments, their scores and other details, labelled in a way which is easy for a computer to make sense of. Go to /r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2o5o5j/eli5_web_services/.xml and you get the same details formatted as XML (specifically RSS), for programs which prefer that. Your browser may automatically recognise that as RSS and format it as a list of posts for you, or it may show you the XML.

ELI5: Web Services

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