Web services

Web services are defined differently at different places. Word-by word translation states that any service provided on the web including a web page is a web service but this isn't true if the technical term web service is referred to.

To define web service, we will look at web service definition from the W3C glossary:

"A Web service is a software system designed to support inter-operable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-process able format (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP-messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards." -W3C, web services glossary.

This definition again, is not completely true as it is more specific to SOAP and WSDL based web services. In fact, later in the W3C Working Group Note, February 11, 2004, it was stated that:

"We can identify two major classes of web services:
- REST-compliant web services, in which the primary purpose of the service is to manipulate XML representations of Web resources using a uniform set of "stateless" operations;
- and arbitrary web services, in which the service may expose an arbitrary set of operations."

So considering that, a more general and better definition of a web service is this, from the preceding mentioned W3C web services glossary definition:

"A Web service is a software system designed to support inter-operable machine-to-machine interaction over a network."

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