Web Applications

WEB APP

Web Services are the mechanisms through which devices can communicate over the World Wide Web. Whether you use a mobile application, search engine or an enterprise system, the user part of the application (the interface) resides on your device. The data, and potentially the business rules, live on a server on the network. How your interface communicates with the server part is the role of Web Services.

The official definition of a Web Service is “a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network.” Breaking this down, the communication between servers requires agreements such as interoperability to fully process interactions on a specific net.

For most systems, these specifications are defined in the system’s Web Service Description Language, or WSDL. A WSDL defines how incoming information, such as queries, need to be structured for the service application to make sense of it, and how outgoing data will be structured so that the requesting application can understand it. These definitions are stored as XML (Extensible Markup Language) specifications. A common structure for WSDL information is the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) that allows communication interfaces to be developed without having to rebuild low-level protocol specifications.

Web Services have become the silent but critical backbone to our modern device-driven world. The common protocols, interfaces and communication standards that have evolved over the last 15 years allow us to develop mobile, tablet and PC-based applications through which you can order lunch, verify stock prices or find the perfect gift in a fast, reliable and securely manner.