Why use a webservice?

[honeymonster]

Hi there I have developed a very simple PocketPC thingy which connects to a webservice, now I'll make a website for it.



Websites and services.. What is the idea? I mean do websites use these services too? And why would they?

Cheers

[LooselyBased]

Could you clarify that question...it does not make much sense.

[giladasaf]

Web site - is something that is hard to define but there are two definitions I can think of.

1. All the files that are stored on the host server and are linked to each other in one way or another.

2. Your domain name like google.com etc. from there you can get anywhere.
Saying that your gate is everything - is problematic but not far from truth.


Now ... on your site you can store web files and other helping files like DB's XML and more. Some files are stupid HTML and others got some scripts and finally there are the modern .net and j2ee files that can be based on very complex program manipulations.

Service is one way to run a function or method. If you like to share your program so that you and others can use the code this is a very elegant way. If you don't want to share and all your files are located on the same server - you don't need a service- you need a class.

[torrud]

If you don't want to share and all your files are located on the same server - you don't need a service- you need a class.

In modern designs you need always classes with business and persistence logic. The difference between a web interface like html files and a web service is that the first one is a front end for human users and the second one is used by another program. Well there are a lot other facts, but this is the important one I think.

So it is not the question to use the own webservice on the own website but to use the same classes in the underlaying layers and creating two front ends (Website, Webservice) if nessecary.

[klintan]

Usually the term web site refers to something like "a collection of connected web pages stored on a web server", and the term web site refers to human readable web pages like html.

In this context, a web server is not restricted to a single physical server, e.g. the web site Microsoft.Com is probably hosted on 10's or 100's of servers, while a web site like AManAndADog.Com is probably hosted on a single physical server together with other web sites.

A web service is a software component that is available via standard web protocols, meaning that it can be accessible from other software components, possibly developed in differented programming languages, deployed on other servers, and on other platforms.

So, web services enable tiered applications (applications deployed on different computers) that can be multi platform (other technologies are often more restricted, e.g. DCOM only works on Microsoft, .Net Remoting requires that both machines have the same version of the .Net framework installed).

For a web site, it is in many cases desirable to have tiered applications, typically for performance, availability, and security reasons. Large companies like a bank often have multiple platforms, so web services simplifies integration for them. In addition to this, web services are, as already mentioned, available over web protocols so a web site may benefit from using web services on other web servers (as may other types of applications too).

Frameworks like .Net have good support for developing web services, but it should be quite possible to develop a web service in a procedural language like C, COBOL, or Fortran. Many companies still use such languages in legacy systems.

In .Net and C#, the decision of whether to use a web service, remoting, or an internal class (in a class library for instance) should be based on the run-time quality and deployment requirements for the application.