What is the difference between a web API and a web service

Question

Is there any difference between a web API and a web service   Or are they one and the same

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Two things are very simple to understand,

API: It's an layer on application which can serve other application request locally.
Webs Service:Is an API which can serve request and respond over the network form remote system over the web or internet .

Note: All Web Service is API's but not all API' is web services

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All WebServices is API but all API is not WebServices  API which is exposed on Web is called web services

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A Web Service if you want is a Web API  Specifically Web API usually means RESTful  HTTP based  web service and Web Service usually means SOAP WSDL   HTTP or SMTP or JMS      Tipically RESTful web services are opposed to Web Services  WSDL SOAP  but recently it has been introduced the term RESTful Web services  with uppercase  W   that means RESTful WSDL SOAP     Check out this chart for differences among the three concepts  http   www2 mokabyte it cms figureproviderservlet figureId IUS-6NS-OBV 7f000001 19624184 5621ef4e--Fig02 jpg  Hope it helps

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In the context of ASP Net a Web API is a Controller whose base class is ApiController and does not use Views  A Web Service is a class derived from WebService and has automatic WSDL generation   By default it is a SOAP api  but you can also use JSON by adding a ScriptServiceAttribute

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API and Web service serve as a means of communication    The only difference is that a Web service facilitates interaction between two machines over a network  An API acts as an interface between two different applications so that they can communicate with each other   An API is a method by which third-party vendors can write programs that interface easily with other programs   A Web service is designed to have an interface that is depicted in a machine-processable format usually specified in Web Service Description Language  WSDL   All Web services are APIs but not all APIs are Web services   A Web service is merely an API wrapped in HTTP     This here article provides good knowledge regarding web service and API

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Difference between Web Service and Web API nicely explained here   https   softwareengineering stackexchange com questions 38691 difference-between-web-api-and-web-service  Text from the link   Web Services - that s standard defined by W3C  so they can be accessed semi-automatically or automatically  WSDL   UDDI   The whole thing is based on XML  so anyone can call it  And every aspect of the service is very well defined  There s parameters description standard  parameter passing standard  response standard  discovery standard  etc  etc  You could probably write 2000 pages book that d describe the standard  There are even some  additional  standards for doing  standard  things  like authentication   Despite the fact that automatic invoking and discovery is barely working because clients are rather poor  and you have no real guarantee that any service can be called from any client   Web API is typically done as HTTP REST  nothing is defined  output can be for eg  JSON XML  input can be XML JSON or plain data  There are no standards for anything    no automatic calling and discovery  You can provide some description in text file or PDF  you can return the data in Windows-1250 instead of unicode  etc  For describing the standard it d be 2 pages brochure with some simple info and you ll define everything else   Web is switching towards Web API   REST  Web Services are really no better than Web API  Very complicated to develop and they eat much more resources  bandwidth and RAM     and because of all data conversions  REQUEST- XML- DATA- RESPONSE- XML- VALIDATION- CONVERSION- DATA  are very slow   Eg  In WebAPI you can pack the data  send it compressed and un-compress un-pack on the client  In SOAP you could only compress HTML request

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Web service is absolutely the same as Web API - just a bit more restricted in terms of underlying data format  Both use HTTP protocol and both allows to create RESTful services  And don t forget for other protocols like JSON-RPC - maybe they fit better

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for more detail visit this link

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The basic difference between Web Services and Web APIs  Web Service   1  It is a SOAP-based service and returns data as XML   2  It only supports the HTTP protocol   3  It is not open source but can be used by any client that understands XML   5  It requires a SOAP protocol to receive and send data over the network  so it is not a light-weight architecture   Web API   1  A Web API is an HTTP based service and returns JSON or XML data by default   2  It supports the HTTP protocol   3  It can be hosted within an application or IIS   4  It is open source and it can be used by any client that understands JSON or XML   5  It has light-weight architecture and good for devices which have limited bandwidth  like mobile devices

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Well  TMK may be right in the Microsoft world  but in world of all software including Java Python etc  I believe that there is no difference   They re the same thing

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A web service typically offers a WSDL from which you can create client stubs automatically  Web Services are based on the SOAP protocol  ASP NET Web API is a newer Microsoft framework which helps you to build REST based interfaces  The response can be either JSON or XML  but there is no way to generate clients automatically because Web API does not offer a service description like the WSDL from Web Services  So it depends on your requirements which one of the techniques you want to use  Perhaps even WCF fits your requirements better  just look at the MSDN documentation

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API vs Web Service  Just pasted the summary of the linked article      Summary          All Web services are APIs but all APIs are not Web services    Web services might not perform all the operations that an API would perform    A Web service uses only three styles of use  SOAP  REST and XML-RPC for   communication whereas API may use any style for communication    A Web service always needs a network for its operation whereas an API doesn   t need a network for its operation    An API facilitates interfacing directly with an application whereas a Web service is a          Read more  Difference Between API and Web Service   Difference Between   API vs Web Service http   www differencebetween net technology internet difference-between-api-and-web-service  ixzz3e3WxplAv  See the above link for the complete answer

[web-services] What is the difference between a web API and a web service?

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