An introduction to web applications architecture
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# Web services

When a service is made available over the internet, it is then usually termed a web service, which describes the service that a client can access from a server over the internet, utilising web protocols and standards to enable the exchange of data between them.

The main protocols and standards employed are XML (eXtensible Markup Language), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), REST (Representational State Transfer) and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) based.

Discussion of these protocols and standards is beyond the scope of this course, but you’ll find articles on these topics in the Further reading section.

The main point to make here is that web services based on the SOA design principles described above will ensure that web applications written in various programming languages can run on various platforms, and can use web services to exchange their data across computer networks in a manner similar to inter-process communication on a single computer.

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OpenLearn - An introduction to web applications architecture
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