In this post, I will explain What is Web Services?
A web service is the communication platform between two different or same platform applications that allows using their web method. A web service can be created in any language, such as Java or other languages and that web service can be used in a .Net based application and a .Net web service can be used in other language application. Web services allow sharing data between multiple applications. Web services can be published, found, and used on the Web. Web services are described using XML based language WSDL (Web Services Description Language). Web Services are accessed using XML based protocol SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol).
For example, if you have a domain and services layer you may create a server that your website, android/iPhone app, and console application may access without duplicating your business logic. Basically, it will be for retrieving data and then let your application decide what to do with that data.
You can use web services instead of C# classes in the following cases,
- You want to expose some functionality to outside world/consumers/other applications
- You want to decouple parts of your system so that they can be changed without affecting other parts of an application
- You want to do make your application scalable, so you create web services and deploy those on different servers