APIs provides product or service to communicate with other products and services without having to know how they’re implemented.
What is a Web Service?
A Web service is a collection of open protocols and standards which are widely used for exchanging data between systems or applications. Software applications are written using various programming languages and running on multiple platforms. It allows you to use web services to exchange data over computer networks.
Types of Web Services
Web services should be implemented in various ways. The two types of widely used web services are SOAP and RESTful web services. SOAP – SOAP is a protocol which was designed before REST came into the picture. The main idea behind creating SOAP was to ensure that programs built on different platforms and programming languages could securely exchange data.
Features of Web API
Here are some essential features of API:
Efficiency Wider reach Customizable Personalization Data ownership Easy integration with GUI Time effective Language-independent
Features of Web Services
Here are some essential features of web services:
Loosely coupled Synchronous or asynchronous functionality Ability to support remote procedure calls Supports document exchange
Differences between Web Services and API
Here are important differences between Web services and API.
Advantages of API Services
Here are pros/benefits of using API:
API supports traditional CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) actions as it works with HTTP verbs GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE. API helps you to expose service data to the browser It is based on HTTP, which is easy to define, expose in REST-full way.
Advantages of Web Services
Here are the important pros/benefits of using web services:
Offers faster communications within and across organizations Each service exists independently of other services. Interoperability has the highest priority. Using Web services, your application helps you to publish its message or function to the rest of the world. Web services help solve interoperability issues by giving different applications a way to link their data. Web services help you to exchange data between different applications and different platforms. It allows applications to communicate, exchange data, and shared services among themselves. Web services are specifically designed to be used as a web page request and help you to receive data. It serves as building blocks which makes it easy to reuse web service components in other services. Web Services are deployed on internet standards such as standard Apache, and Axis2. It provides WSDL, HTTP, driven services.
Disadvantages of API
Here are important drawbacks/cons of using API services:
Creating API is a very time-consuming process A fixed scale is necessary Imprecise boundary delineation To create API, programming knowledge is necessary Maintenance cost is very high It can crash when testing API
Disadvantages of Web Services
Drawbacks/cons of using Web services:
It does not access from browser Not leverage emerging Web developments (Semantic Web, AJAX XMLHttpRequest, etc.) Some web services are simple to use, but there are some flaws of using it. Any time one creates a service to handle a variety of customers, there is a demand for specialized machine requirements. The HTTP protocol is not reliable, so it does not offer any guarantee of delivery of the response.
