How would you explain the term 'Web Services' to a non-technical person?

As a person of finance, how would you explain the term开发者_如何转开发 'web services' to me.

I've looked around and all definitions seem really technical. I've asked my colleagues and it's still not very clear.

What's your take?

This may not be accurate but should give them an idea.

"They are web sites that other software (as opposed to human) can use to get information"

Web services are a way for your server (might say "computer") to ask another computer for information, or to tell it do do something.

Note:sometimes precision must be sacrificed for the sake of clarity. To what degree depends entirely on your target audience.

They are like a web version of the friendly telephone clerk at the movie theater, sitting around and waiting to dispense certain information to anyone that calls and asks for it.

Sorry if that is too non-technical. Also - does a human even actually answer the phone at movie theaters anymore?

"Web Services" simply enable two different computers to take advantage of web technology as a conduit to communicate and exchange data with each other. Instead of the server providing access for direct human interaction, it provides access for computer-to-computer interaction at a lower level, and the results are usually subjected to further processing before being made available for human interaction.

A web service is a mechanism for transmitting data between two different machines, regardless of the underlying operating system or software which runs on top of it. Examples of web services are receiving information about the weather, or local tax information by passing the service a postal code, or receiving tracking information from UPS, FedEx by passing it a tracking number.

It is a machine-to-machine service exposed via the Internet using Web technologies.

A service can be any number of things: ask/search/compute/store information etc.

Bear in mind that "Web Services" is somewhat vague and thus definition will likely vary.

At a very basic level, web services are the protocols that allow servers (like ISPs) and clients (us) to communicate with each other. So it's things like HTML, XML, and Java.

Web services let computer programs exist partially on your computer, and partially on the world wide web.

This has all kinds of advantages like allowing the part that lives online to be updated without you having to do anything, etc.

It's especially good because the part running on your computer can use many different "services" online.

"A web site for computers"

A web page that returns Xml instead of Html (if they understand what Xml is) so that it is machine-readable.

An internet site that can return information to other sites. Example: feeding weather forecasts

How much do you want to know?

Web Services is computer speak for one (better?) way for 2 computer programs to talk to each other, there are many other ways, but if you want to understand the difference between a WebService and let us say .NET Remoting or Java RMI, you have to be prepared to tolerate some computer mumbo jumbo.

One of the biggest advantages of WebServices over many others (inlcuding the 2 I mentioned) is that it is platform independent, which means that 2 programs can communicate through WebServices regardless of what langauge they are written in.