Web services: user interfaces for machines

After interviewing with MotionBased for a front end UI/web developer position, I realized it’d be a good idea to get my hands dirty with the ins-and-outs of the back end: that is, I wanted to learn more about the inner workings of the things that I would be making look pretty. (Of course, I wouldn’t only be making things look pretty, I’d also be making them, actually, you know, usable.)

Anyway, I decide to learn more about web services and the architecture behind that particular bit of terminology. It turns out that a “web service” is simply a standalone system that is designed to be truly interoperable with other standalone systems in an open, non-proprietary way.

The concept of web services is rather important, actually. Web services allow engineers to build robust, yet tiny, pieces of code that are able to interact with other robust, yet tiny, pieces of code elsewhere on the internet — with no knowledge of how those pieces of code actually work. All each web service needs to understand is what to provide and what to look for.

From a user interface designer’s standpoint, designing an application to utilize web services seems, frankly, natural. User interface designers make interfaces to applications in ways that require little-to-no training from a user’s or a developer’s end. If a beginner user can become an intermediate user right off the bat with no training, the UI designer has done his or her job. Good UI designers can create UIs that need no training. These UIs speak for themselves.

And, I suppose, that’s what web services do. They speak for themselves to other machines, such that the other machines require little-to-no training on how to use them. And ’cause of this, a web service is but a user interface for a machine!