What can we do with web services
While Web services allows all these dynamic features to combine multiple services into applications, you still have to build the services first. Programming languages in Computer science is continually evolving. We began decades ago with the idea of a function whereby you provide it some parameters, it executes some operation on those parameters, and it returns a value based on its calculations. Eventually, this first concept evolved into the object where each object had not just a number of functions it can perform but also its own private data variables, rather than relying on external system-wide data variables that previously made it more complex to develop applications. As applications began communicating with each other, the concept of defined universal interfaces for objects became important, allowing objects on other platforms to communicate even if they were written in other programming languages and ran on other operating systems.
At the most recent step, Web services has moved towards the concept of XML-defined interfaces and communications, finally uniting any kind of application with another, as well as providing the freedom to change and evolve over time, as long as they are designed to the appropriate interface. The versatility of XML is what makes Web services different from previous generation component technologies. It allows the separation of grammatical structure (syntax) and the grammatical meaning (semantics), and how that is processed and understood by each service and the environment it exists in. So now, objects can be defined as services, communicating with other services in XML-defined grammar, whereby each service then translates and analyzes the message according to its local implementation and environment. Thus a networked application can truly be composed of multiple entities of various makes and designs as long as they conform to the rules defined by their service oriented architecture.
Thus, with this in mind, Web services allow you to:
- Interact between services on any platform, written in any language.
- Conceptualize application functions into task, leading to task-oriented development and workflows. This allows a higher abstraction of software that can be employed by less software-technical users that work on business level analytics.
- Allow for loose-coupling, which means that interactions between service applications may not break each time there is a change in how one or more services are designed or implemented.
- Adapt existing applications to changing business conditions and customer needs.
- Provide existing or legacy software applications with service interfaces without changing the original applications, allowing them to fully operate in the service environment.
- Introduce other administrative or operations management functions such as reliability, accountability, security, etc., independent of the original function, thus increasing its versatility and usefulness in the business computing environment.
