How can I discover existing web services?

Question

I'm sure I sound like a total noob with this question, and I've looked at a couple posts that are basically asking the same question in the title, but the body didn't give anything helpful to my skill or knowledge level.

In this post the OP mentioned that they did some "digging and drilling" to find out that there was a web service in REST format. In another post I found that the OP was using "web console" to look at the activity of a website they were visiting.

I would really like to have more knowledge and methods for finding web services that I can reference and use is some of my new or updated applications, whether RESTful or not. In summary, how do I "dig and drill" to find that a site has a web service I can use programmatically?

Answer 1

The only sensible way to find web services that you can use is to ask.

• If the service is intended for your use, then you will be told that.
• If the service is not intended for your use, then you will be told that.
• If you use a service that is not intended for your use, then that will generally be a bad thing.