What is the difference between "Web Services" and "web services"?

Question

I consider there to be a distinct difference between "Web Services" and "web services" and find myself referring to the latter as "lower case web services".

I'd loosely list the differences as:

• "Web Services"

  • most conforming to the W3C definition
  • based around the WS-* stack
  • enterprise-level
  • mature and dependable
  • strong focus on industry standard-based interoperability

• "web services"

  • no formal definition
  • based around a loose stack, not necessarily XML-based
  • startup-level
  • strong focus on simplicity
  • interoperability as a necessity, but less bound to more mature practices
  • open to new technologies

I'm interested in finding a more formal definition of "web services" and what others think on the matter of any difference between the two.

I'd also be interested in hunting down any references to "lower case web services" as I'm sure I've come across it somewhere.

Answer 1

I've seen the distinction used where "Web Services" is used to indicate SOAP-based services and "web services" to indicate either non-SOAP services and/or any type of web-based service irrespective of application protocol. However, I don't think there are any hard-and-fast rules, and you certainly can't make any assumptions based on capitalization.

I'd also be wary about labeling non-SOAP as 'startup level' or 'informally defined' as there are many very large companies using this type of service (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Flickr, ...) and the services are neither startup level nor informally defined. And you'll probably find they're more 'enterprise ready', mature, and dependable than most so-called "enterprise" web services (irrespective of capitalization). Most of these things have more to do with the capabilities of the engineers implementing them than the actual choice of application protocol or technology.

Answer 2

A web service is any service delivered over http that is intended to be read by a program rather than a human.

Answer 3

I don't think that there is a difference between "Web Services" and "web services". Any occurrence of one or the other is just the habit or convention of the particular author.