Darragh Whelan - 20029611

What is a Web Service?

The World Wide Web Consortium defines it as:

"a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-

machine interaction over a network"

What dose this mean?

This is the communication of two devices on the internet that are

following set rules.

What dose this mean? (cont)

In there most basic form, they take data fed into them over a network, carry out a transformation process, and then return the information back over the network.

No,so what are they really?!

They range from the simple such as.Embedding Google Maps

To the complex such as cloud computing.

But they are generally anything that you run over a network on another host.

Would I be using them?

Yes!They are everywhere.

This presentation is been hosted on a web service.

Everyday you may use Web Services to, Get you email Get the weather Your G drive in college

How do they work?

They mainly run on top of existing technologies such as

TPC/IPHTTPSMTPPOPIMAP

How do they work (cont)

If we take this presentation as an example. It was converted and then hosted on

shareslide.net

It was then embedded onto blogger using there API

So when we load the blogger page, they web browser also sends a request to the shareslide servers requesting to access to the files.

How do they work (cont)

The shareslide servers return the files, and a list of commands used to control the presentation in flash.

Why are they so good?

The main advantages of them are It is moving the data processing from

the edge of a network into the centre where. This is useful because servers are

configured for handling these requests and are generally fast then a client device.

They centralise data storage, where access for other clients may be faster

Why are they so good? (cont) Give a client access to more information then

it would have available with out them Such as your weather gadgets on your

sidebar. These work by sending a geographical

location to a service, witch then returns the weather report that is then displayed to the user.

Improve data security as the data is not stored locally and may be transferred over secure protocols such as HTTPs.

So what's next with them? The next big thing with web services

is cloud computing.

This is where all of your data processing that is normally carried out on the client device is moved into the centre of the network onto faster servers .

So what's next with them? (cont) The ‘mash-up’ of data

Data mash-up is where a number of difference web services are combined in one place to provide one block of information.

This is already happening today with sites incorporating APIs from different sites such as twitter, Google APIs

References

WebServices(2008), Available at: http://www.webservices.org/(Accessed: 11 February 2009)

Amazon Web Services(2008), Available at: http://aws.amazon.com/(Accessed: 11 February 2009)

Web service list API(2007),Available at: http://www.webservicelist.com/(Accessed: 11 February 2009)