Editing Technology/Software Development/Web development/RESTful APIs and web services (section)

== Web Services ==

Web services are software systems designed to facilitate machine-to-machine communication over a network. They enable different applications to exchange data and perform operations by exposing their functionalities through standardized protocols.

'''Types of Web Services''':

1. '''SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)''': SOAP is a protocol for exchanging structured information in web services using XML. It defines a standardized format for messages and provides a strict set of rules for communication between client and server.

2. '''RESTful Web Services''': RESTful web services, as discussed earlier, follow the principles of REST. They use HTTP methods to interact with resources and typically transfer data in JSON or XML format. RESTful APIs have gained popularity due to their simplicity and scalability.

3. '''JSON-RPC''': JSON-RPC is a lightweight protocol that allows remote procedure calls (RPC) using JSON data format. It provides a simple and language-agnostic way to invoke methods on a server from a client.