A web service is a communication mechanism defined between various computer systems. Without web services, custom peer-to-peer communication becomes cumbersome and platform-specific. The web needs to understand and interpret a hundred different things in the form of protocols. If computer systems can align with the protocols that the web can understand easily, it is a great help.
A web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network, as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at https://www.w3.org/TR/ws-arch/.
Now, in simple words, a web service is a road between two endpoints where messages are transferred smoothly. The message transfer is usually one way. Two individual programmable entities can also communicate with each other through their own APIs. Two people communicate...
