Searching the Web Service, I asked about a topic on the topic, as follows:
Question: What is a Web Service?
However, a question has been raised about the distinction between Web Service and Application Service. I did a quick search on that, but it was not very clear. Here are the sources:
Source Application Service: link
Web Service Source: link
After all, what are the differences between the two?
This question so far unanswered demonstrates that the difference between "Application Service" and "Web Service" can not be described in the right way; and not even the wrong way.
"Application Service" does not even have a reasonably established definition, otherwise google would tell us. In fact I've never used that term myself.
But I think I have something to contribute, then it follows:
The term Web Service became popular with the advent of Microsoft .Net Framework in the early 2000s.
One of the great innovations of Microsoft's "revolutionary" platform was that of Web Services - a messaging standard for integrating systems from different vendors, developed with different technologies. >
As defined by Microsoft and documented by W3C , Web Services use the SOAP standard of communication. This protocol was developed on behalf of Microsoft while it was preparing .Net Framework and then submitted to standardization.
Then .Net Framework and Visual Studio have come full of features to facilitate the development and consumption of such Web Services, using the new SOAP protocol. Then the other platforms had to run behind to support this pattern.
Since SOAP is based on XML , according to W3C, Web Services receives and returns serialized XML code, formatted accordingly with certain standards.
According to this historical definition, therefore:
Web Services is a messaging standard using the SOAP protocol and especially designed to integrate different vendor systems strong> different technologies .
SOAP and its XML companion proved to be too cumbersome, too complicated.
In addition, corporations needed to integrate not just different vendor softwares made in different technologies, but they also needed to separate and integrate the layers of their own systems with high performance for scalability.
Eventually the same services consumed by different layers of the same system needed to be available also for external consumption.
