Reasons for having a Web service

[Fred Victa]

Suppose that there is a company that auctions off wrecked automobiles online. Automobile insurance companies can sell wrecked automobiles by going to that company's website and entering in all of the information pertaining to the wrecked automobile. Pictures of these wrecked automobiles can be seen on the company's website and buyers can go to this website to place bids on the cars that they want to buy. Would there be any good reason for this company to have a Web service? Why or why not?

[Sujeeth Pakala]

Firstly question is very high level.

Based on the business model you explained, consider B2B and B2C scenarios. There could be other

- You could expose a service which notifies car seller about expression of interest on a particular car from the website.
- You expose a service to enable clients (customes and organizations) to receive several alerts about information particular to their criteria (something like magical subscriptions to spam emails ;-) sorry for strong reasoning)
- You could expose a service to accept bids from clients

You can think of other scenrios based on the scenarios and business..

Also, think of SalesForce. It is delivered as a service cluster to the customers. It contains several services.

Hopw this helps to understand importance of services :-)

[Mohamed Iqzas]

One strong reason for having web service is connecting two independent applications on two different platforms.
Now in your example its very much suited because the One company has to deal with another company, and its more likely that they have two different applications which deals with their own business information.
Now the insurance companies need to connect to the auctioning company through web service.