Web Services

A web service (WS) is either:

• A service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or
• A server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a network, serving web documents (HTML, JSON, XML, images).

The use of the term “Web” in Web Service is a misnomer. Web Services do not use the World Wide Web (WWW), a human user interface running on the Internet, but rather a machine-to-machine service running on the Internet using the WWW protocols.

In a web service, a web technology such as HTTP is used for transferring machine-readable file formats such as XML and JSON.