What a web service is
In the course of your work as an analyst, you may need to retrieve data through an API, exposed by a system within your network, for example. However, this is a rare case, since today almost all external data sources are exposed as web services, even within a company.
Web services are the most common and popular way of communicating information between heterogeneous information systems. A web service is basically a software module hosted on a server that is available over the internet to provide data to specific requests from a client.
There are mostly two types of design models for web services: Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and REpresentational State Transfer (REST):
- SOAP relies heavily on XML and defines a highly typed messaging structure through schemas. All messages exchanged between the service and the client are all encoded through Web Service Definition Language (WSDL), which, in turn, is based on the XML format. One of the most important...
