Microsoft's techie

I would like to discuss essential things that a developer must be familiar with. In todays competitive world, as more technologies are emerging and so are technology terms. If you look around the internet you will find so many new things that people are talking about. If you don't know the meaning of those terms you'll be not understanding what they are talking about. So I'll be posting the definitions and very very high level of understanding on those terminologies. After that as and when I'll start different blogs for a particular type of technology for detail discussion.

Let us start with
1. Web service

Web service is a performing remote method calls over HTTP.

A software system designed to support inter operable machine to machine interactiona over network.

Web services are frequently just Web APIs can be accessed over a network, such as the Internet, and executed on a remote system hosting the requested services
In Simple terms

You want to use some function e.g. a function DayDiff which takes two dates as parameters and results back the difference of days between both the dates. If somebody has already written the same function, you would not like to reinvent the wheel. You would like to use it. Web service is the way through which he can publish (or expose) this function over the internet and you can discover it and use it in your application. Though lot of things are going on behind the hood. But for introduction purpose you can skip all that.

2. SOAP

On your way to web service you will come across this term. It stands for Simple Object Access Protocol. This is a protocol for exchanging XML based messages over HTTP. SOAP forms the foundation layer of the web services protocol stack providing a basic messaging framework upon which abstract layers can be built.

As a layman's example of how SOAP procedures can be used, a correctly formatted call could be sent to a Web Service enabled web site - for example, a house price database - with the data ranges needed for a search. The site could then return a formatted XML document with all the required results and associated data (prices, location, features, etc). These could then be integrated directly into a third-party site

3. Mashup

Mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool.

Creating a new web service by combining two or more services available that was not originally provided by either source.

There are basically three types of mashups

• consumer mashups

Consumer mashups combine data elements from multiple sources, hiding this behind a simple unified graphical interface

• data mashups

A data mashup mixes data of similar types from different sources, for example combining the data from multiple RSS feeds into a single feed with a graphical front end.

• Enterprise mashups

usually integrates data from internal and external sources

• Business mashups

A business mashup is combination of all above types of mashups, focusing on both data aggregation and presentation, and additionally adding collaborative functionality, making the end result suitable for use as a business application.