Web Services

Web services have been around since the mid 1980s when people started to use electronic data interchanges to facilitate transactions. It has been seen that small firms view Web services as an opportunity to generate their revenues as well as to but increase their business response and partners. The idea of web services has been come from Internet. There are various advantages and disadvantages of using WebServices in business area or just as a commercial area. Advantages of web services are similiar to its components advantages.

• less expensive to use. This means that if we maintain less number of records or pages then we will require less no of vendors. Less number of vendors mean less efforts is used in maintainig and updating the records.
• Data quality Web services protect data from errors which usually comes when working with database. The data quality web services also improves and increase sales of web service business.
• One of the advantages of webservices is interoperability. Interoperability means that system is not specific to any language and any platforms. Similarly web service offer interoperability so that on can easily work.
• Implementation is another advantage of web services. If we talk about word implementation in web services we actually meant to say deployment. Web services are deployed or arranged over internet technology.
• Application to Application interaction are built on standards such as XML, WSDL, UDDI, HTTP. These standard solve many communication problems.

• Although web services are simple to use but there are some flaws of using it. One of the disadvatage is over Matching Requirements. Any time one create a service to handle a variety of customers, need specialized machine requirements.
• Second disadvantage of web services is availability. Every user or client who uses web services know that it is not available hundred percent all the time.
• Third Disadvantage of web services is security. Web services are available to public through http-based protocol. So every one can access web services and use it. This flaw can be avoided using authentication mechanisms.
• Guaranteed Execution is a major problem of web services because HTTP which is hypertext transport protocol is not a reliable protocol that is it doesnot provide any guarantee of delivery of response.