With the latest advancements in technology, web service is growing as an emerging technology in this modern world. It is a software service that is used to communicate between two electronic devices over a network. The web service is popular in web applications because of the natural quality of being self-contained and self-describing. This article will discuss the benefits of web service and how it helps in the application or program.
A web service is an organized code that can be called and activated remotely by making use of the HTTP requests. The web services grant the developer to publish their functionality of the code to the rest of the world. Once it is visible on the network, there is a possibility that other programmers will make use of the functionality in their application.
Another advantage of the web service is that interoperability has the highest priority. Web service interoperability objectives are to allow programming applications to communicate with each other and exchange data or services among themselves. For instance, .NET applications can communicate with Java web services and the other way around. Web services are used to ensure the independence of the technology and application platforms.
In addition, lower cost is one of the advantages of web service too. Since the new system is assembled from ready-made web services, the cost of system development will be reduced significantly. The cost decreases and is converted into profits and may be passed on to the clients. The clients stand to win from the cost cuts and proficiency brought in by the web service.
In summary, web services offer multiple benefits such as revealing the existing function on the network, interoperability and cost reduction. All of the benefits of web services are discussed in depth above. There are web services available in GeoDataSource namely the Location Search Web Service and the Neighboring Countries Web Service. Location Search Web Service lets the user to lookup for city information by providing the location coordinate in the latitude and longitude form whereas the Neighboring Countries Web Service enables the user to check for the neighboring countries based on the input of the country code in ISO3166-2 format.