When you click a button to buy something for the house, you usually receive the confirmation and tracking number right away. When you tap a link to open and browse a folder containing all of your photos, you have immediate options: to update, edit, and delete them in real time. The many, many types of web services—broadly defined as chunks of codes running on IP-enabled machines—are everywhere. Over the past 25 years, the advent of web services has changed the way consumers interact on the internet. Many everyday computing tasks, like the ones listed above, can be completed without downloading any special software or setting up an elaborate environment.
Web services, job schedulers, and businesses
For businesses, web services offers an enormous opportunity to streamline their processes. For example, think about cloud computing and options, such as the appropriately named Amazon Web Services. Platforms like AWS have made it possible to access more resources through a simple web interface rather than disparate infrastructure. More generally, web services reduces hassle and enables more automation, whether for consumer-facing activities like tracking packages, looking up customer accounts or organizing browser bookmarks, or more internal operations.
With this in mind, it's no surprise that the concept of web services has become integral to job scheduling, since its simplicity and technological maturity can make a job scheduler even more efficient. Web services and job schedulers are complementary: The latter can automate requests for the former, which in turn provides users with the requested information in a convenient form, free of superfluous details about process.
How web services can work within job schedulers
The evolution of the web has demonstrated the perks of standardization and straightforward access to data. Many individuals first came to the web via web browsers such as Apple Safari, Microsoft Internet Explorer, or Google Chrome, but the web's power has since extended into the realms of hybrid mobile apps and, as we noted above, enterprise job scheduling.
A job scheduler with full-fledged web services support brings the web's convenience to the scores of critical workflows that keep business up and running behind the scenes.
Why Web services benefits scheduling and business
Overall, having a job scheduler to support Web services requests eliminates the grunt work of having to manage them manually. A solution such as Automate Schedule utilizes a RESTful Web service on the scheduling server and can be run with HTTP basic authentication or HTTPS.
Moreover, external web services can be called from within a job running on Automate Schedule. Response data in XML or JSON form can be relayed to a local file or even passed directly into subsequent requests and commands, allowing for efficient automation.
With the standards-based design of the Web, using web services is a sensible way to access data across many different systems. External services can be incorporated into internal jobs, allowing for nuanced activities such as setting up a Automate Schedule job based on the status of a business process.
A common problem with many jobs, like shipping a parcel, is that they are delayed until information such as financial verification comes through. Having a job scheduler like Automate Schedule streamlines the process of acquiring this data and incorporating it into the job for an overall more efficient process.
