Difference between a Web Service and an Enterprise service

[Former Member]

hi,

i have observed that the terms "web service" and "enterprise service" are used in different contexts in SAP. Whats the conceptual difference between the two of them? Is there any difference in the implementation of the two as well?

Regards

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi

An enterprise service is an interface to well-defined functionality provided by

functional business components. The interface defines a set of service operations

that perform work and can receive and send messages. Enterprise services

are used by other programs that are said to consume the services. Services are

loosely coupled to the entities that consume their functionality and to each other.

The performance characteristics of an enterprise service such as response time

are dictated by a business service level. (https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/40c05360-0501-0010-63bd-aedd415b6e05 )

Web Service is the recommended technical solution to provide enterprise services. enterprise services can be provide by varied of technical solutions, from web services to IPC.

HTH,

Natty.

[Former Member]

With all respect to the other. To keep things simple.

A web service is a service that uses web technology, e.g. is basically HTML based. The Google search bar of field that is used in many web pages is an example of this.

An Enterprise Service is service that has content related to a business process.

However, in most cases of Enterprise Services there is really a case of Enterprise WEB Services.

Technically a web service should be divided in to parts. The presentation which is always html of xml based AND on the other hand the origin. this can be a simple html-page created by a text editor or a complex program that included logic, connect to a database en generates the html-code to be send to the receivers. A well known technology for this is PHP, which can be recognized as a hyperlink ending with .php and a list of parameters. Sending this information to the web server will start some php-program that generates html-code and sends this code back.

[Former Member]

Hi Nirmal,

Difference wrt implementaion point of view:

Most of the web services have following characteristics:

1)implementations are point to point

2)the platform to which they are going to connect is known

3)the implementaion is solid i.e not changing one

so the web service is

1)not available publicly

2)connection cannot be changed

whereas wrt SOA implementation the information about the web services and the way to connect it is known hence the webservices can be identified and can be used in other applications or implementaions i.e. reusability increases.

[philipp_steves]

Hallo Nirmal,

technically spoken, there is no difference in the runtime of enterprise services and webservices (as far as jour webservices use HTTP and communicate XML-based).

But from SAPs perspective enterprise services are modelled and reside in the Enterprise Service Respository, where webservices are not modelled (within SAP).

Regards

Philipp