The Basics of Web Services
From MDC
Contents |
[edit] The Basics
Web services are not really anything that new, and actually, if you've ever used an RSS or Atom feed to pull news from a website, you have an idea of how a web service might work.
Web services exchange data from a server to a client, using an XML format to send requests, so both the server and the client can understand each other. (XML Introduction).
A better way to understand a web service is to compare it to a HTML form communication with a server side script (such as PHP or ASP) to post and send data. Both web services and forms send and receive requests. The only major difference is that a web service uses XML.
[edit] Examples of Web Services In Action
As said before, RSS and Atom feeds are a simple example of how a web service works, most commonly, XML-RPC or SOAP are also used to communicate between a server and a client.
[edit] Introducing XML-RPC
XML-RPC is a type of web service and has been around since 1998, though not an official W3C standard, it is widely used. XML-RPC was developed by Useful Inc, along with Microsoft.
[edit] Introducing SOAP
SOAP, a web service, is listed as a W3C standard, and is similar in ways to XML-RPC. SOAP also has backing from IBM, as well as Microsoft.
[edit] SOAP or XML-RPC?
Briefly, SOAP was intended to fill gaps in XML-RPC. An example is, it is easier to send a multi-dimensional array with SOAP rather then with XML-RPC. SOAP also has more features then XML-RPC, but XML-RPC on its own, has its uses.