A Web Service is a communication method over two electronic devices over the Web. The final goal of having native Web Services on Microsoft Dynamics NAV is to make it easy for other systems to integrate with Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
W3C defines Web Services as a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL).
There are some concepts we need to know before continue to talk about Web Services:
WSDL-> W3C defines a Web Service Description Language as an XML format for describing network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information. The operations and messages are described abstractly, and then bound to a concrete network protocol and message format to define an endpoint. Related concrete endpoints are combined into abstract endpoints (services). WSDL is extensible to allow description of endpoints and their messages regardless of what message formats or network protocols are used to communicate, however, the only bindings described in this document describe how to use WSDL in conjunction with SOAP 1.1, HTTP GET/POST, and MIME.
SOAP-> Simple Object Access Protocol provides a simple, extensible, and rich XML messaging framework for defining higher-level application protocols offering increased interoperability in distributed, heterogeneous environments. This was the only protocol supported for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009. Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 also supports a new protocol called ODATA.
For Detail see Video on how to expose pages and codeunits on webservice.
Last edited by Formatted on 12th October 2013, 4:54 pm; edited 2 times in total