One thing I seem to come across when talking about new startup ideas for companies is the implementation of some sort of web service. I have personal experience building these type of services so I figured I would take a brief moment and talk about the technology behind them.

The first thing that you must understand is that a web service on the surface looks like nothing more than your average web site. I am sure most the sites you visit have a web service hidden in the background and you have no indication that it is even there. This is the beauty of the system, the service is only visible to those who really look for it. Transparency of this type of system is a thing of beauty, but this does not mean security is not important.

So what is a web service? Well if you head over to wikipedia you will see the long version, the way I describe it (which I am sure some will comment is “too general”) is a “web site that can pass information in different formats depending on the type of request it receives.” To quickly break that down, a web service allows you to detect when the client is asking for HTML, XML, JS, and nearly any other format. Upon detection of this request you can than tailor the response based on the request type.

The usage of these web services tends to be through XML requests and responses. The XML sends a request, usually for some type of data (like a list of blog posts). The service can then respond accordingly sending back a serialized XML structure of the blog posts. This data can than be displayed, or built into an object on the recieving system for manipulation. The consumption usually performs the latter operation and displays it in any format they wish. A common example of web service consumption can be seen on any RSS feed or a twitter sidebar (as you see on the side of this page). I hope this quick 3 minute overview of web services has provided you with a better grasp on a common misunderstood concept.