Nowadays, web services are more frequently used in software development. A Web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. There are a lot of benefits of using web services. We can be distinguished them in business benefits and development benefits.
Development benefits
- Interoperability – All the business logic can be exposed to web services. Now client applications can use those web services without re-inventing the wheel. This allows us to use a different programming language for both web service and client.
- Versatility – Web services can be accessed manually by humans or by applications and other web services. Clients can combine data from multiple web services before it will be displayed to the end-user.
- Code re-use – One web service might be utilized by many clients.
- [Side effect] Reducing time to integrate applications
- [Side effect] Much faster development of new applications
Business benefits
- Reduction of costs
- Easy integration between third-party partners
- Allow remote access to business systems
- All kind of devices can integrate the same web service
There are many varietes of web services implementations. REST has increasingly displaced other design models. For this reason I like to spend a couple of posts on testing REST web services. I have chosen Java to create testscripts, because it has great potential in terms of response assertions.