I have searched a lot upon internet but still i didn't get the clear difference between web services and web APIs? Somewhere I read that all web services are API's but all API' are not web services. How?
What all I know is both allow to utilize the functionality of other applications.Can someone describe me clear difference?
I have been on the same journey to learn the differnce between Web API (not JUST API) vs Web Services.
First, we know for a fact that both use the Web as the communication tool as stated by #Kris.
While looking at these 2 videos, both serve as the "middleman" (the waiter in the restaurant) for a client to ask a Web Server to process and deliver a response.
Web Service (From 0:35)
API (In general) (From 1:12)
When I was looking for an actual differnce between the two, usually most articles and videos go on an unrelated comparison between "Web Services vs API" as they exclude the "Web" out of "Web API".
See this article, for example, which contains the title "Web API Vs Web Service...." yet, contain sub-titles like:
"Differences of API vs Web Service"
"Pros and Cons of Web Services vs API Service"
"Web Service vs API: Fueling Both With Scraping Robot’s API"
The only difference I could find is if we were to discuss this in .NET context.
Here's a question post related to this.
To sum it up, Web Services are used in the SOAP protocal while Web API is usually created in the RESTful way. The more detailed answers are in the post but ultimatelly do not answer the main question that is asked.
Conclusion: The question raised in the public domanin has no clear definition to what is difference between the two, thus the 2 terms are ,for the most part,
interchangeable
All web services are APIs. An API is an Application Programming Interface. But there are offline APIs, which are not web services. There are APIs for all things from Office to Websites. The API is just a defined interface to be able to control/communicate with some software. Web Services just provide that means of connecting over the web.
There is more to discuss when you are talking about APIs which are communication protocols and data formats, but you get the basic idea.
An API (Application Program Interface) is the interface through which another program can communicate with a program.
A web service in this context is one of those programs with an API. 'Web' means that it is accessible via the web, mostly via HTTP. A service usually has a well defined purpose.
For instance a date web service's purpose could be to provide the current date. The API of my service would have a single 'endpoint': get the date. The service then implements this API. It somehow retrieves the date and sends it back.
Related
can someone help me telling what is RESTful and difference with `web Service'?
i tried to search but i get confused between it and web service can anyone help ?
It's name clearly state its meaning that services provided on the web are called a web service
web service has two type REST API and SOAP API
RESTful Web Services are basically REST Architecture based Web Services. In REST Architecture everything is a resource. RESTful web services are light weight, highly scalable and maintainable and are very commonly used to create APIs for web-based applications.
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is a messaging protocol that allows programs that run on disparate operating systems (such as Windows and Linux) to communicate using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and its Extensible Markup Language (XML).
RESTful is one kind of web service. Another kind is SOAP. I think comment in this link will help you
https://stackoverflow.com/a/2285743/4874281
I am new to Web development. And hence, if the question is dumb, please be polite. For creating my application, I had to take a decision of whether writing a web service or a web application. After searching a few questions in stackoverflow, I came to know that, web service is something which doesn't involve human interaction. And web application is what human uses ( the UI/web page kind of stuffs ).
But lately, I saw gmail is a web service ( email service ). But I was confused from here on, because, gmail provides a UI, and human interactions do occur. And from there on, I got confused again.
So what I figured out from this is, gmail website is like a web application for users to use directly. The web application in turn uses the web service provided by Google for email. Is my understanding right? So can a web application be a client for web service?
If I am wrong somewhere, please do correct me. I hope to be clear after someone throws light on this with some good example. Thanks in advance.
You are quite right. Basically a Web Service has several endpoints over HTTP (normally) that provides data (generally in JSON or XML) and are meant to be consumed by Web Clients. Sometimes the are also called Web API's (Application Program Interface).
A Web Application is quite similar to a Web Service but it provides an interface where the user can interact with. Usually Web Applications are consumers of Web Services or Web APIs.
Following your example, Google email is could be considered as both, a Web Service and a Web Application. It is a Web Service because it provides a set of HTTP endpoints that works independently of its Web UI Application (GMail). In fact, you can find third party Web Apps that interact with the Google email Web API.
This concept is very important when designing Web Solutions. Ideally you want to design and implement a good Web API, usually a RESTful Service (in JSON/XML). Then you or others will be able to implement different types of applications (Web, Mobile, etc.) because of this API.
What does a Web service really mean ? I am not looking for a theoretical explanation, I am looking for something practical.
I was thinking that anything I can call from an external client is a Web service, so a basic PHP which returns JSON data could be a Web service.
But then I started reading about Web services in W3Schools.org and I got confused. If the PHP URL which returns JSON data is a web service, why would I need to do SOAP, WDSL etc ... to create a Web service. Isn't it extra work?
Also, if SOAP is the way data is sent back and forth, what about other transport types?
What differentiates a RESTful Web service from a SOAP based web service?
When you are talking about a webservice people generally misunderstand what it means, a webservice is simply a way to interact between a and b that abstracts the use of local technology standards. A WSDL defines the way in which the SOAP message is being sent over the channel. REST uses JSON over HTTP, WSDL uses SOAP over HTTP.
The advantage of a webservice is, say you develop one piece of code in .net and you wish to use JAVA to consume this code. You can interact directly with the abstracted layer and are unaware of what technology was used to develop the code.
SOA is a set of design paradigms and standards that tell you how to develop your services, in SOA each service is meant to comply with the principles listed below. WSDL is generally linked with but not essential for a SOA solution. If you wish to learn about SOA google "Thomas Erl SOA".
Priciples of SOA
Standardized service contract
Service loose coupling
Service abstraction
Service reusability
Service autonomy
Service statelessness
Service discoverability
Service composability
This Q&A Restful vs Other Web Services brings a lot of light to what is a webserver, and differences from SOAP and REST. Id recommend to read all the answers (many of them are very good).
BRIEF:
I am working on a web application, we decide to make some major. We did some researches and we found this tutorial that talks about "Creating api centric application".
we found the topic is very useful to us as we need in the near future to make an android app.
WE STARTED WITH:
Doing some searches starting from this query "api centric application" and we found these two topics related to that query:
REST
WEB SERVICE
WHAT WE WANT TO KNOW:
What is the difference between these terms "API centric application", "REST", "Web Service"
Is Rest an alternative way of Web service?
Is API Centric Application an approach of REST?
Is Web Service the parent of all this terms?
Do i need to produce some other information in order to this question
be eligible for policy.
After study all these types i found that:
A Web Service is a type of API, and all web-services must be API but not all API's must be web-services, The REST is a new concept of writing web-services and Web services written by apply REST Architectural concept are called RESTful web services
So my focus will be on changing my application to be API centric application by using REST Web service as this practice
I am newbie here and confused by few things
Some websites (twitter, foursquare, etc) provide API to third-party developer to call. are those APIs the web services that the sites provide?
Are those web sites themselves built on top of those public APIs/web services? theoretically is it possible?
Comparing the traditionally built website and the websites build on top of web service, pros and cons? are there any performance, scalability, etc differences?
Thanks in advance!
I'm sure somebody can give you a more exact answer but reading your question and applying my self-taught knowledge:
The simple technical definition of Web Services according to W3C:
A Web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network.
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/NOTE-ws-gloss-20040211/
I like to think of web services as the interactive elements of a site that its customer base utilizes. For example, Twitter's web services include: tweeting, messages, hashtags, etc. Web services are what users get to DO or DATA passed back and forth.
A public web API provides means for developers to utilize the web services on their own site. For example, Twitter's API allows example.com site to utilize tweeting, messaging, hashtags, etc from within their own domain. An API is how developers get external access to web services to make apps using those services.
I have no idea about this question. I wouldn't do that. I would use the methods the public API exposes access to. But, I've never written my own API, let alone on the scale of Twitter or foursquare.
I hope this helps.
First of all, maybe you need some more info about what an API is: please take a look at the Wikipedia api page.
To answer to you questions (these are only general thoughts and not best practices):
An API, in this case, is a way that a developer uses to access a webservice, and it's not the service itself.
The websites you mention are not using their own APIs, as these APIs are meant for remote users (clients), and offer limited data sets, while the websites need maximum performance, access to the full database, and (almost) always use server-side code. The websites you mentioned, probably use other, server-side, high-performance APIs.
See the previous point: although it depends highly on which APIs you use, what you call "traditionally built websites" (that is, web applications using server-side APIs) can afford higher performance than websites totally built on top of remote APIs, because they do not depend on the bottleneck of the network connection (because, again usually, the web server and the database server either run on the same machine, or communicate faster than the client's browser and the server).
The reason that would make most people choose to develop a webapp the traditional way is that free APIs provide limited functionality (e.g. Google custom Search, limited to 100 reults).