Web service maintenance involves the following tasks:
- Creating or altering web services – Create or alter web services to provide web applications supporting a web browser interface and provide data interchange over the web using REST and SOAP methodologies.
- Dropping web services – Dropping a web service causes the subsequent requests made for that service to return a 404 Not Found HTTP status message. All unresolved requests, intended or unintended, are processed if a root web service exists.
- Commenting on web services – Commenting is optional and allows you to provide documentation for your web services.
- Creating and customizing a root web service – You can create a root web service to handle HTTP requests that do not match any other web service requests.
- Enabling and disabling web services – A disabled web service returns a 404 Not Found HTTP status message. The METHOD clause specifies the HTTP methods that can be called for a particular web service.