Web Services
Generally Web Services facilitate the Business to Business interactions by providing an open and dynamic communication model based on certain standards and specifications. It's simply an application that operates over the Internet. It plays a vital role in Stock Exchange Quotes, Flight Booking Services, Railway Reservation System and Weather Report throughout the world.
Simple Web Service Architecture
Three Key Features
- Interoperable - Platforms and Programming languages doesn't matter. Supports Interoperable machine to machine Interaction over Internet
- Self Describing - Each web service is self described using WSDL. Web services are accessible by posting their WSDL descriptions.
- SOAP Interactions - SOAP is an XML based messaging protocol for exchanging information between the web services
Usage in Distributed Computing
Older distributed computing are mostly tightly coupled systems. They are less effective in Business to Business interactions and the dependencies between the components are more.
Web Services provides the loosely couple systems, dynamically bound applications and very helpful in Business to Business interactions. Each business components are independent of each other.
When two companies merge
Consider two companies merge and the customer information is stored in two different systems. The newly merged systems must integrate without compromising the functionalities in each system.
Web Services provides a better solution to handle this situation. Both the companies should expose their functionality as web services. A new application is developed to integrate the above two systems, so that the clients can use the both systems effectively.
Online Shopping
An online shopping application is composed of complex functionalities like Currency Conversion, Credit Authorization and the Payment gateway. It will be tedious process, if the company develops all the functionalities by themselves. Instead, there were many web services that provide the functionality for Currency Conversion, Payment Processing & other complex solutions. Simple way we need to do is, just consume those services and complete our business application with minimal time.
Application Required Different User Interface
Consider we need to develop an application that should support various user interfaces like Windows based interface, Web based interface, Pocket PC, & etc without changing any code.
Web Services provides you the better solution for this. Presentation Layer will differ for each user interface. So it should be independent of Business Layer and Data Access Layer. Business layer supplies all the functionalities through web services. So there won't be any separate functionality for each user interface. It will be same for all the user interfaces.
Hope we discussed about the usage of Web Services in different scenarios. There are many more benefits of web services. We will discuss them in the upcoming articles.