Real World Web Services

Book description

The core idea behind Real World Web Services is simple: after years of hype, what are the major players really doing with web services? Standard bodies may wrangle and platform vendors may preach, but at the end of the day what are the technologies that are actually in use, and how can developers incorporate them into their own applications? Those are the answers Real World Web Services delivers. It's a field guide to the wild and wooly world of non-trivial deployed web services.The heart of the book is a series of projects, demonstrating the use and integration of Google, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, FedEx, and many more web services. Some of these vendors have been extremely successful with their web service deployments: for example, eBay processes over a billion web service requests a month!The author focuses on building 8 fully worked out example web applications that incorporate the best web services available today. The book thoroughly documents how to add functionality like automating listings for auctions, dynamically calculating shipping fees, automatically sending faxes to your suppliers, using an aggregator to pull data from multiple news and web service feeds into a single format or monitoring the latest weblog discussions and Google searches to keep web site visitors on top of topics of interest-by integrating APIs from popular websites most people are already familiar with.For each example application, the author provides a thorough overview, architecture, and full working code examples.This book doesn't engage in an intellectual debate as to the correctness of web services on a theological level. Instead, it focuses on the practical, real world usage of web services as the latest evolution in distributed computing, allowing for structured communication via Internet protocols. As you ll see, this includes everything from sending HTTP GET commands to retrieving an XML document through the use of SOAP and various vendor SDKs.

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Table of contents

  1. Preface
    1. Organization
    2. Conventions Used in This Book
    3. Using Code Examples
    4. Comments and Questions
    5. Acknowledgments
  2. 1. Web Service Evolution
    1. 1.1. Client/Server Origins
    2. 1.2. The Undefined Web
      1. 1.2.1. Scraping Data
      2. 1.2.2. Fragile Interdependence
    3. 1.3. Planning for Interdependence
  3. 2. Foundations of Web Services
    1. 2.1. Basic Networking
      1. 2.1.1. Streams of Bytes
      2. 2.1.2. Network Vagaries
    2. 2.2. HTTP
      1. 2.2.1. GET
      2. 2.2.2. POST
      3. 2.2.3. Potential of Bytes
    3. 2.3. From HTTP to RPC
      1. 2.3.1. Leaky RPC Plumbing
      2. 2.3.2. RPC Meets the Internet
      3. 2.3.3. Evolving to SOAP
      4. 2.3.4. SOAP
      5. 2.3.5. Web Services Definition Language
  4. 3. Development Platform
    1. 3.1. Tools and Projects Used
      1. 3.1.1. Apache Jakarta Tomcat
      2. 3.1.2. Apache XML-RPC
      3. 3.1.3. Apache Axis
    2. 3.2. Test Drive
      1. 3.2.1. Our First SOAP Server
      2. 3.2.2. Dynamic SOAP Client
      3. 3.2.3. Static SOAP Client
      4. 3.2.4. When WSDL Changes
    3. 3.3. Other Platforms
      1. 3.3.1. PHP
      2. 3.3.2. Perl
      3. 3.3.3. Microsoft
  5. 4. Project 1: Competitive Analysis
    1. 4.1. Application Features
      1. 4.1.1. Listing Searches
      2. 4.1.2. Adding Searches
      3. 4.1.3. Viewing a Search
      4. 4.1.4. Removing a Search
      5. 4.1.5. Updating a Search
    2. 4.2. Gathering Web Service Data
      1. 4.2.1. Connecting to Amazon
      2. 4.2.2. Connecting to eBay
        1. 4.2.2.1. eBay API wrapper
        2. 4.2.2.2. eBay connectivity
      3. 4.2.3. Connecting to Google
      4. 4.2.4. Developer Tokens
  6. 5. Project 2: Auctions and Shipping
    1. 5.1. Auction Listing XML
    2. 5.2. Processing the Auction XML
    3. 5.3. Connecting to FedEx
  7. 6. Project 3: Billing and Faxing
    1. 6.1. Starting the Transaction
    2. 6.2. Getting a Transaction Notification
    3. 6.3. Responding to the Transaction
  8. 7. Project 4: Syndicated Search
    1. 7.1. Making Feeds Available
      1. 7.1.1. Examining RSS Feed Generation
    2. 7.2. Using an Aggregator
  9. 8. Project 5: News Aggregator
    1. 8.1. Getting Started
    2. 8.2. Deleting a Watcher
    3. 8.3. Current Watcher Listing
    4. 8.4. Watcher Implementation
      1. 8.4.1. AbstractWatcher Implementation
      2. 8.4.2. Amazon Watcher
      3. 8.4.3. eBay Auction Watcher
      4. 8.4.4. eBay Search Watcher
      5. 8.4.5. Google Watcher
      6. 8.4.6. RSS Watcher
    5. 8.5. Going Further with Quartz
  10. 9. Project 6: Audio CD Catalog
    1. 9.1. CDDB
    2. 9.2. Building a CD Catalog
  11. 10. Project 7: Hot News Sheet
    1. 10.1. Presenting the News
    2. 10.2. Gathering the News
  12. 11. Project 8: Automatic Daily Discussions
    1. 11.1. Weblogs
      1. 11.1.1. XML-RPC and Weblogs
    2. 11.2. Generating Posts
    3. 11.3. Generating a LiveJournal Post
    4. 11.4. Viewing the Blogger Post
  13. 12. Future Web Service Directions
    1. 12.1. Future Technologies
      1. 12.1.1. REST
      2. 12.1.2. UDDI
      3. 12.1.3. Rendezvous
      4. 12.1.4. BPEL/BPEL4WS
    2. 12.2. Future Directions
      1. 12.2.1. Lowering the Bar
      2. 12.2.2. Understanding the Business Model
      3. 12.2.3. Security
      4. 12.2.4. Consolidation
  14. Index
  15. About the Author
  16. Colophon
  17. Copyright

Product information

  • Title: Real World Web Services
  • Author(s): Will Iverson
  • Release date: October 2004
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9780596006426