Introduction

In the previous chapter, you learned about Node.js, which runs on the server-side. This chapter will cover the other side of services – you will learn how to call them from the client-side. There's a good chance that services being accessed are, in fact, implemented in Node.js, but it is common for them to run on other platforms as well, such as Java, C#, and Python.

Web pages are static and of limited use without fresh data. Web services are a set of technologies that provide standards for your web page to communicate with other servers and sites to exchange data.

To enable services implemented in different languages to communicate with each other, they need to have common rules regarding how the requests and responses being exchanged should look and be structured. For this reason, there are a number of different standards and approaches to web services out there that define the format of data being exchanged. The most popular combination used for websites...