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Building and using web services give you certain benefits. There exists a strict separation of responsibility. A web service is build for one purpose only. This is the foundation of component Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Multiple smaller components are easier to manage than 1 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.

Here are a couple examples of web services:

• 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 insurance company, you built your own web service for computing the monthly payment based on the customers information. Comparing sides, such as Independer, use this web service to compare different insurance companies.
• The google maps api lets you get directions between two locations.