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Web services are, in general, a bit further standardized. They use SOAP as the data layer, they use UDDI for the discovery and they use HTTP for the transport. WSDL then is used for the description of the web service, XML is used as the underlying meta datatype and W3C XML Schema (or Relax NG or similar) is used for data validation. In addition something like Schematron can be used for input and reference validation and XSLT can be used to transform the packages into an &quot;eatable&quot; format by the end-to-end application.<br />
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A lot of buzzwords, no? ;)<br />
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All these techniques (and many others even!) can be used together to form web services or on a higher level, an Enterprise Service Bus (which is, in short, a bunch of web services and non-web servicing applications together).<br />
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The downside of any other technique is most often that it is not standardized. Through web pages you get HTML, or Text or a Word file. All of these can be parsed or standardized (Text can be in CVS format, you can decide upon HTML to only contain certain tags and a Word file can contain only a table). But all these decisions are non-standard and are made between two parties (or even inside one party). For a quick and dirty setup they can be fine, but on the long run, when you want to exchange data and information, they lack functionality (you have to build and design everything yourself).<br />
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Usually there comes a point where you have had enough of reinventing the wheel and you start using web services. Sometimes this point does not come and sometimes this point will reverse, simply because your task is too simple or too lightweight to rectify use of web services.<br />
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JSON and similar techniques are used by large parties when low entrance and low overhead are important (AJAX). But more and more even these companies find themselves using more and more web services because so much is already automated for them....<br />
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Regards,<br />
-- Abel --<br />

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As to your question &quot;which is better?&quot; I can only say that it really depends on the task at hand, the skills in your team, the willingness to learn a new technique (or forest of techniques) and the need to make your interface available to a large set of other applications.<br />
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When you give a developer a link to your WSDL they can easily extract the objects and start programming against it. With some other semi-standard techniques similar tools exist. But if you invent your own interface (i.e. of the kind &quot;if plaintext is &quot;getusername&quot; then return username as plaintext&quot;) you should think of also creating a public toolset so that others don't have to go down the path in trying to understand your own interface.<br />
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Oh, I forgot about security. That is a very complex issue, but when it comes to SOAP it is now quite well established and secure layers can be used together with encrypted XML to exchange data. Again, when you have to invent your own security routines this can be daunting and not even near as good as what's now the product of many years of maturing.<br />
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But security is not always an issue and sometimes all you want is exchange some PDF documents based on some tags which you could hide in the HTTP header fields. In that case it becomes rather easy.<br />

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For the example which you have mentioned above (google map), Javascript &nbsp;is best, web service calls are expensive as XML parsing is an additional task. <br />
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But Web services have there own advantages and as Abel mentioned above, it all depends on your task in hand which is the best choice.<br />

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Hi: I'm starting to learn web services. &nbsp;What is the difference between writing<br />
javascript to access information on a website and accessing this information<br />
by a web service ? For example, I can insert a Google Map having a specific address, <br />
using an .aspx file and calling GMap() or through a webservice, using GoogleMapService().<br />
What are the differences ? Which is better ?<br />
<br />
Thanks !
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Hi: I'm starting to learn web services.  What is the difference between writing
javascript to access information on a website and accessing this information
by a web service ? For example, I can insert a Google Map having a specific address, 
using an .aspx file and calling GMap() or through a webservice, using GoogleMapService().
What are the differences ? Which is better ?

Thanks !

web service versus javascript ?

Web development can range from developing the simplest static single page of plain text to the most complex web-based internet applications, electronic businesses, and social network services using a wide variety of languages and standards, including the familiar HTML, JavaScript and jQuery, ASP and ASP.NET, PHP, ColdFusion, CSS, PHP, Flex and Flash, but also the implementation of a broad list of standards including XML, WSDL, SSDL, VoiceXML and many more.

Web Languages and Standards

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a tool used to implement and deploy a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to support distributed computing where services have remote consumers. It features a runtime and a set of APIs in the .NET Framework for building connected, service-oriented applications. Services typically have a WSDL interface (Web Services Description Language) that any WCF client can use to consume the service, regardless of which platform the service is hosted on. WCF implements many advanced Web services (WS) standards such as WS-Addressing, WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Security, RSS Syndication Services, WS-Discovery, routing and better support for REST services.