API vs Webservice

Question

What is the difference between a webservice and an API  Is the difference more than the protocol used to transfer data  thanks

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In a generic sense an webservice IS a API over HTTP  They often utilize JSON or XML  but there are some other approaches as well

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Think of Web service as a web api  API is such a general term now so a web service is an interface to functionality  usually business related  that you can get to from the network over a variety of protocols

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Basically  a webservice is a method of communication between two machines while an API is an exposed layer allowing you to program against something  You could very well have an API and the main method of interacting with that API is via a webservice  The technical definitions  courtesy of Wikipedia  are  API  An application programming interface  API  is a set of routines  data structures  object classes and or protocols provided by libraries and or operating system services in order to support the building of applications   Webservice  A Web service  also Web Service  is defined by the W3C as  quot a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network quot

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API Application Programming Interface   the full form itself suggests that its an Interface which allows you to program for your application with the help or support of some other Application s Interface which exposes some sort of functionality which is useful to your application   E g showing updated currency exchange rates on your website would need some third party Interface to program against unless you plan to have your own database with currency rates and regular updates to the same  This set of functionality is when already available with some one else and when they want to share it with others they have to have an endpoint to communicate with the others who are interested in such interactions so they deploy it on web by the means of web-services  This end point is nothing but interface of their application which you can program against hence API

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API is code based integration while web service is message based integration with interoperable standards having a contract such as WSDL

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API s are a published interface which defines how component A communicates with component B   For example  Doubleclick have a published Java API which allows users to interrogate the database tables to get information about their online advertising campaign   e g  call GetNumberClicks  user name   To implement the API  you have to add the Doubleclick  jar file to your class path  The call is local   A web service is a form of API where the interface is defined by means of a WSDL  This allows remote calling of an interface over HTTP   If Doubleclick implemented their interface as a web service  they would use something like Axis2 running inside Tomcat   The remote user would call the web service   e g  call GetNumberClicksWebService  user name   and the GetNumberClicksWebService service would call GetNumberClicks locally

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Check this http   en wikipedia org wiki Web service  As the link mentioned then Web API is a development in Web services that most likely relates to Web 2 0  whereas SOAP based services are replaced by REST based communications  Note that REST services do not require XML  SOAP  or WSDL service-API definitions so this is major different to traditional web service

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An API  Application Programming Interface  is the means by which third parties can write code that interfaces with other code  A Web Service is a type of API  one that almost always operates over HTTP  though some  like SOAP  can use alternate transports  like SMTP   The official W3C definition mentions that Web Services don t necessarily use HTTP  but this is almost always the case and is usually assumed unless mentioned otherwise   For examples of web services specifically  see SOAP  REST  and XML-RPC  For an example of another type of API  one written in C for use on a local machine  see the Linux Kernel API   As far as the protocol goes  a Web service API almost always uses HTTP  hence the Web part   and definitely involves communication over a network  APIs in general can use any means of communication they wish  The Linux kernel API  for example  uses Interrupts to invoke the system calls that comprise its API for calls from user space

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another example  google map api vs google direction api web service  while the former serves  delivers  javascript file to the site  which can then be used as an api to make new functions    the later is a Rest web service delivering data  in json or xml format   which can be processed  but not used in an api sense

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