Editing Web service (section)

{{Short description|Service offered between electronic devices via the internet}}
A '''web service''' ('''WS''') is either:
* a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the [[Internet]], or
* a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a network, serving web documents ([[HTML]], [[JSON]], [[XML]], images).{{cn|date=March 2023}}

In a web service, a web technology such as [[HTTP]] is used for transferring machine-readable file formats such as [[XMLHttpRequest|XML]] and JSON.

In practice, a web service commonly provides an [[Object database|object-oriented]] web-based interface to a database server, utilized for example by another web server, or by a [[Mobile app development|mobile app]], that provides a user interface to the end-user. Many organizations that provide data in formatted HTML pages will also provide that data on their server as XML or JSON, often through a Web service to allow [[Web syndication|syndication]]. Another application offered to the end-user may be a [[Mashup (web application hybrid)|mashup]], where a Web server consumes several Web services at different machines and compiles the content into one user interface.