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What are "web services"?

I am reading a book about ASP.NET Programming in C #. The book makes the following comment:

Earlier editions of this book covered Web Services, a function that allows you to create code routines that can be called by other applications over the Internet. Internet services are more interesting when given the rich development of clients (since they allow you to provide web functionality to regular application desktops) and they're in the process of being replaced by a new technology known as WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). For these reasons, web services are not included in this book. However, if you want to branch out and explore the world of web services, you can download the web service chapters from the previous edition of this book from the book downloads page. The information in these chapters still applies to ASP.NET 3.5 because the function of the web service has not changed.

Can anyone suggest in "layman" terms what exactly the web service is and are they really being replaced, at least in .Net, with WCF? What's a practical example of a web service? Are they separate programs that run on the web server and are called by the client or clients?

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High-level web services are similar to applications that run over the Internet. However, there are a number of fairly complex protocols and methods that make up main thread web services:

  • SOAP ( another link ) and WSDL ( another link ) are two grand-daddy acronyms that are significant in web services and they get a lot of press.
  • REST , and JSON are two other acronyms that are very important when you think of web services ...
  • HTTP and TCP are two of the most common transports that most web services run on.


WCF is another layer of sophistication in these protocols and formats that Microsoft introduced. WCF provides a flexible, customizable, debuggable framework (and more) for writing and consuming web services.

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It is basically a way of exposing APIs over HTTP using a standard protocol. Currently, the 2 main protocols are SOAP and REST based services.

If you want to go deeper, the wikipedia article on web services pretty much covers all the basics.

Most major websites provide some kind of web service API to interact with it. Here are some examples:



The reason for the thousand and one books on Amazon is that while the concept is pretty simple to understand, service implementation is not as easy as you might think, and the books talk more about best practices when it comes to network service implementation.

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Web services are services offered on the Internet that can be accessed by applications.

A thermometer app running on your mobile phone, for example, can get the local temperature from a meteorological web service.

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As I like to think about it, a web service is a program on a web server that you can send data to and receive data over the Internet. For example, there might be a web service that provides weather information for a given zip code ... but not in the way this website presents you, but in a more abstract way ... so that 1000 websites can request information via The Internet, and then display this data in your own way or use it for any other purpose.

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But don't we have CORBA, RMI, sort of for this? They may not be using HTTP. But why is the use of HTTP so important and why is it making so much noise?

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