Web services give you the advantage of sharing and receiving information just by using a URL. It enables web applications to talk each other that will reduce programming cost and burden.

Web services make it possible to share data efficiently and across different networks. For e.g, If you own a web site and have got an affiliate business, you can display product information or latest offers by using the web service provided by the merchant company and enable your user to search for a affiliate product from your site. This can free you from updating information manually and you get the latest information. Another example is display of share price. By subscribing to a web service which provides updated share price information, you can display the latest share price when a user searches for a particular share.

When you access a web service through a browser all you can see is specially formatted XML. This means a web service uses XML for exchanging data. It uses a protocol called SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). Being platform independent and light weight, XML is the right choice for exchanging data. All the information exposed by the service will be listed in this XML which you can parse and display in your own format. If you are a programmer you can use these services to add additional programming functionality to your application by adding a reference to the web service to your project and access the methods exposed by the web service to program more efficiently.

The main advantage of using web service lies in its inter Interoperability. This means you can create and use a web service in any language that supports web service. It makes exchanging data simple across different networks and platforms.