Difference between Webservice and API

Hi Everyone,

Here I am sharing one of important concept /question which is asking in every api testing interview . I hope you will get clarity in that. Have a look.

What is an API?

API is the acronym for Application Programming Interface. It is a software interface that allows two applications to interact with each other without any user intervention.

APIs provides product or service to communicate with other products and services without having to know how they’re implemented.

What is a Web Service?

A Web service is a collection of open protocols and standards which are widely used for exchanging data between systems or applications.

Software applications are written using various programming languages and running on multiple platforms. It allows you to use web services to exchange data over computer networks.

The APIs that interact over HTTP protocol (need internet), we call them as webservices. For example, the cleartrip/makemytrip is a webservice, because, in order to display the search results, they need to interact over HTTP protocol (need Internet connection) with Indigo/Air India servers

The things that does not need internet or do not interact over HTTP protocol, we call them as API. For example, in order to work with Selenium, we need to integrate our java program with Selenium jar files. To interact with Selenium API jar files, we don’t need internet or http protocol. Similarly, to read data from excel, we can integrate POI library API with our java program and start working without any internet connection.?

All webservices are APIs but reverse is not true. The weather app on your laptop/mobile is a webservice (api) that interacts with weather server and provides us real-time weather information.

In the next blog, we would discuss about the Difference between Webservice and API. All The Best!

Refer: https://www.guru99.com/api-vs-web-service-difference.html

Thank you for reading!?

Date: Sun,12 March 2023