Web Services

A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over a network. It is a software function provided at a network address over the Web with the service always on as in the concept of utility computing. The W3C defines a Web service generally as:-

a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network

Most Web services do not adopt this complex architecture.^{[citation needed]} This article describes it in more detail.

The W3C also states:

We can identify two major classes of Web services:

• REST-compliant Web services, in which the primary purpose of the service is to manipulate representations of Web resources using a uniform set of statelessoperations.
• Arbitrary Web services, in which the service may expose an arbitrary set of operations