Web Service is a Client-Server Application or Application Component using for communication. Web services provide many methods for communication between two devices over the network. Web Service is a software system for the interoperable machine to machine communication and it is a collection of standards or protocols for exchanging information between two devices or application.
Now, let us understand there are some of the applications like JAVA, .NET or PHP, they can communicate with other applications through web service over the network. Like the JAVA application can interact with Java, dot(.)Net and PHP applications. So the web service is a language which is an independent way of communication.
Now, there are mainly two Types of Web Services:
- SOAP Web-Services.
- RESTful Web-Services.
SOAP Web-Services
SOAP web service stands for Simple Object Access Protocol, and it is an XML-based protocol for accessing web services. SOAP is a W3C recommendation for communication between two applications.
SOAP is XML based protocol and it is platform independent and language independent. Now, by using SOAP web service, you will be able to interact with other programming language applications.
Advantages of SOAP Web Services
- SOAP web service uses its own security. And the SOAP security is known as WS Security.
- SOAP web service language is Platform Independent and their service can be written in any programming language and also can execute on any platform.
Disadvantages of SOAP Web Services
- SOAP web service uses XML format which must be parsed to be read. And the SOAP web service represents many standards which must be followed while developing the SOAP applications, so it is slow and consumes more bandwidth and resource.
- SOAP uses WSDL APIs because they don’t have any other mechanism to discover the web service.
RESTful Web Services
REST web service stands for Representational State Transfer and it is an architectural style, not a protocol.
Advantages of RESTful Web Services
- RESTful web services are faster than SOAP web services because there is no strict specification like SOAP and also it consumes less bandwidth and resource.
- RESTful web services are language independent and can be written in any programming language and can execute in any platform.
- RESTful web service can use SOAP web services as the implementation.
- RESTful web service provides different data formats for ex. Plain Text, HTML, XML and JSON.