I ran the Web Service examples in the book, and everything worked fine. And I do understand that the simple function HelloWorld() is not a real-world example.

So I understand the technical aspect of it (well, maybe not all the registering attributes - thank Heavens .NET automates most of that.

But what I still need to understand is - Are Web Services simply used when you want to code JavaScript?

What are examples of when a Web Service is mandatory? When you're accessing databases? Or what else. Can you please provide a laymen's term example(s) of why I'm using web services?.

For example, the book say - on page 352, top - "But at the same time, it's also possible to exchange data between an ASP.NET or PHP website and a client browser using JavaScript"
If my website is ASP.NET based, doesn't it contain JavaScript already? Or are we talking about "another" website other than my own that uses JavaScript??

Hi there,

Web services are great for server-to-server communication, but also for client-to-server communication. In the book's example, the browser makes a request for data coming from the server using a web service. You could have done the same using a full postback, but that typically takes more time, and causes the screen to refresh completely. Not so with services. As a very concrete example, consider Google's auto-suggest. When searching on google.com you see a list of potential matches which are retrieved by making calls to the server.

Note, though, that web services are a broad term. For .NET, ASMX services, WCF and Web API would all fall in that category.

There's plenty of stuff written about web services that may give you more ideas: https://www.google.nl/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=...f+web+services

Cheers,

Imar

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Imar Spaanjaars
http://Imar.Spaanjaars.Com
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Author of Beginning ASP.NET 4.5 : in C# and VB, Beginning ASP.NET Web Pages with WebMatrix
and Beginning ASP.NET 4 : in C# and VB.
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