Understanding web services
There is no definitive agreement about what a web service is, no single standard to follow, and no set of widely adopted patterns. The opposite is true: there is an endless multitude of opinions, countless patterns, and an endless internet shouting match over the “correct” way to deliver data to clients.
The chaos and noise surrounding web services can be overwhelming, and it can be difficult to know where to start. However, the lack of standardization can be liberating because it means that a project can focus on delivering just the functionality that clients require, without any of the boilerplate or overheads that standardization can sometimes bring.
Web services are just data access APIs that are accessed over HTTP. A RESTful web service is just a web service that uses aspects of the HTTP requests to determine which parts of the API a client wants to use. The term RESTful comes from the representational state transfer (REST) pattern...
