Ws — Introduction to Web Services and SOA + 5 more topics

A Web Service is essentially a function or an application module that you can access over a network, usually the internet. Instead of installing a piece of software on your computer, you're "calling" a service provided by someone else's computer.

Imagine you want to know the current weather in your city. You don't perform the weather calculation yourself. Instead, your weather app sends a request to a weather service (a Web Service) on a server somewhere. That service processes your request and sends back the weather data.