Real World Web Services by Will Iverson

"Web services" is one of those tech buzzwords that bubbles up and takes hold. Sometimes those buzzwords fade and never fulfill their promise (Remember all that talk about "push technology" in the late 90's?). Web services, however, seems to be fulfilling its promise.

Users of Web encounter web services all the time, although they may not know it. But it's web services that allow the links to Amazon.com to show up, and get automatically updated, on this page. It's a web service that allows a website to automatically display the weather forecast as served up by some other site, or Google Adwords. And it's a web service that allows RSS headlines to get displayed automatically on a page.

If you are a webmaster, and you've been wondering how to implement advanced web services on your site, Real World Web Services by Will Iverson may just be the place to start. This book focuses on "using existing web services in productive and useful ways." This isn't a Dummies book — it's from O'Reilly which means its for the professional webmaster who knows something more about programming than using a Front Page bot. Most of the programming in the book is Java, although Java isn't the only way to go about web services.

Before you can make use of the book, you will obviously need full access to either a website, or an offline testing server to try out your code. The author also recommends using Apache Jakarta Tomcat as your application server, and also Apache XML-RPC and Apache Axis, which is the Apache SOAP web services toolkit. The Apache tools aren't the only way to go — after all you can always pay a lot for Microsoft's .NET, or look for similar offerings developed in PHP or Perl. If all that's a mystery, then this book isn't for you.

Still with me? OK — these are the examples you will learn how to implement in this book.

We start out with ways to make money. First is a project that let's you do competitive analysis searching Amazon.com, Google, and eBay to find price information on competing projects. This serves to introduce you to the web service offerings those three companies make available to webmasters. The second example shows how to automate some of the processes involved in selling on eBay, and shows how to use Fed Ex's web services to automatically calculate shipping costs. The third example uses PayPal's web services to help automate some of the tasks involved in collecting money.

Article Author: Bruce Kratofil

Bruce Kratofil blogs on bugs and other things that can go wrong with your computer at The BugBlog, and writes about computers and economics at BJK Research

Visit Bruce Kratofil's author page — Bruce Kratofil's Blog