Google Maps - What's a "Web Service"?

The formal definition of a web service is "a software system designed to support interoperable, machine-to-machine interaction over a network". In plain terms, developers can think of a web service as a standard programming "function" that happens to be hosted on an external machine, one that your Logi app reaches over the Internet. You send it parameters and the web service sends you results, with the benefit that the whole process is language neutral.

The diagram above illustrates how this fits into the Logi application architecture. Usually, the "parameters" that you send to the web service come from a database that your application queries. The results are used in the HTML pages that are output to a browser. Logi Studio elements make the process of connecting to, and communicating with, the web service very easy.