A
Web service is a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the
World wide web. In a web service, web technology such as the
HTTP, originally designed for human-to-machine communication, is utilized for machine-to-machine communication, more specifically for transferring machine readable file formats such as
XML and
JSON. In practice, the web service typically provides an
object-oriented web based interface to a database server, utilized for example by another web server, or by a
mobile application, that provides a user interface to the end user. Another common application offered to the end user may be a
mashup, where a web server consumes several web services at different machines, and compiles the content into one user interface.