A web service is an application that runs on a server and allows a client (such as a browser) to remotely write/retrieve data to/from the server over HTTP.
The interface of a web service will be one or more API endpoints, sometimes protected with authentication, that will return data in an XML or JSON payload:
Figure 4.1. Vuebnb web service
Web services are a speciality of Laravel, so it won't be hard to create one for Vuebnb. We'll use routes for our API endpoints and represent the listings with Eloquent models that Laravel will seamlessly synchronize with the database:
Figure 4.2. Web service architecture
Laravel also has inbuilt features to add API architectures such as REST, though we won't need this for our simple use case.
