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A web service is a piece of computer code that is running somewhere in the world, and that you can talk to. Because you are communicating with a computer and not a human being, you have to document exactly on how to communicate. This is done by a protocol. There exists are multiple types of protocols. You can think of a website as a web service. You ask for information using the URL , and you receive an answer following the html HTML standard.

The following architecture is the foundation of web services:

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Building and using web services give gives you certain benefits. There exists a strict separation of responsibility. A web service is build built for one purpose only. This is the foundation of component Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Multiple smaller components are easier to manage than 1 one big component. Furthermore, because the communication happens over a protocol, it does not matter what programming language the other party is running. The only thing you know of a web service is how to communicate with it using the protocol. We will go into details on two of these protocols in the next two chapters.

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• You have the postal code, and want to retrieve the street name and city name. An external system has the responsibility to keep this data up to date.
• As an insurance company, you built your own web service for computing the monthly payment based on the customers information. Comparing sides, Comparison websites such as Independer , use this web service to compare different insurance companies.
• The google maps api Google Maps API lets you get directions between two locations.