When building web services for consumption as a client, does it matter what language is other party's application programmed in?

Question

For example, my application is built in PHP & MYSQL and the service i am trying to consume, provide their .NET C# SDK samples on their website to help integerate. I am learning about PHP webservices. My question is, does it matter which language that other application uses? Does my application need to be in .NET C# as well ? or Web services and API's are inter operable across different programming languages ? Any help will be appreciated. Thanks in Advance.

Answer 1

No.

There's no need for the clients to be using the same framework or language as the Web Services that they consume.

Part of the point of Web Services is to enable machine-to-machine interaction in a platform-agnostic way. You shouldn't need to "know" about the underlying implementation in order to consume the Web Service, just how to call it. For example, you can consume a Web API RESTful service from Java, C, JavaScript, etc. and don't even need to be aware of the fact that they were using Web API as opposed to a different framework.

By analogy, if I call a friend on the phone, I don't need to know who his cell phone service provider is, what kind of phone he uses, or anything like that - I just need to know his phone number.