(1) A web service is a service offered by a computer process on a computer system to other computer processes in a computer network, in particular the public internet. The computer process offering a web service is referred to as a provider agent. The computer process accessing a web service is referred to as a requester agent (or web service agent). The software agents participating in the offering and access of a web service are known as interacting web service agents.
(2) A Web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards. [See W3C Web Services Architecture]
See the Wikipedia article for "Web service".
Singular of web services.
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Updated: December 17, 2005 07:38:23 PM -0500
Copyright © 2005 John W. Krupansky d/b/a Base Technology