This is a book about Web Services. Web Services are still more like movement than a mature technology. The movement is motivated by a vision of a semi-automated web that can support long chains of interactions between autonomous agents.
There are three important components to that vision. One is interoperability: a service can have clients (agents) from any platform, in any language. Another is autonomy: an agent can discover the services it needs from their published descriptions that include both what the service can do and how it does it (the interfaces of available actions).
The third is (semi) automatic code creation: one description can be used by a development framework to automate the creation of code for clients and by the services themselves. As of today, interoperability is close to full realization, with only occasional glitches; autonomy is a distant vision; code creation is useful but it still has problems.
Interoperability has been achieved in part by using an XML-based high-level protocol (SOAP) for message exchanges between clients and services. As long as the client can produce message in the right format, it doesn’t matter what language they’re written in or what platform they run.
The first three chapter of this book show how to write platform-independent Web Services clients in Javascript and Java running from within a browser.
Chapters 4 and 5 continue with the idea of integration, but this time authors develop a service of their own (a local book club) and show how it can be integrated with other services (like amazon).
Chapter 5 add some security to te service but also intodruces an important new services: Web services without SOAP. There is a large movement and a well-motivated argument that SOAP is not good idea, and that the same benefits of interoperability can be achieved using just HTTP.
In Chapter 6, authors introduce a great tool - XSLT — and show how it can be used to process the output of a web service.
Chapter 7 continues with REST, showcasting another great tool called WebDAV.
In Chapter 8, authors use WebDAV and XSLT to develop a framework for collaborative authoring of a store of documents.
Finally in Chapter 9, authors show how the current state of WebServices’ description and automatic code generation supposed to work and does work in simple cases.
Download Google, Amazon and Beyond: Creating and Consuming Web Services
There are three important components to that vision. One is interoperability: a service can have clients (agents) from any platform, in any language. Another is autonomy: an agent can discover the services it needs from their published descriptions that include both what the service can do and how it does it (the interfaces of available actions).
The third is (semi) automatic code creation: one description can be used by a development framework to automate the creation of code for clients and by the services themselves. As of today, interoperability is close to full realization, with only occasional glitches; autonomy is a distant vision; code creation is useful but it still has problems.
Interoperability has been achieved in part by using an XML-based high-level protocol (SOAP) for message exchanges between clients and services. As long as the client can produce message in the right format, it doesn’t matter what language they’re written in or what platform they run.
The first three chapter of this book show how to write platform-independent Web Services clients in Javascript and Java running from within a browser.
Chapters 4 and 5 continue with the idea of integration, but this time authors develop a service of their own (a local book club) and show how it can be integrated with other services (like amazon).
Chapter 5 add some security to te service but also intodruces an important new services: Web services without SOAP. There is a large movement and a well-motivated argument that SOAP is not good idea, and that the same benefits of interoperability can be achieved using just HTTP.
In Chapter 6, authors introduce a great tool - XSLT — and show how it can be used to process the output of a web service.
Chapter 7 continues with REST, showcasting another great tool called WebDAV.
In Chapter 8, authors use WebDAV and XSLT to develop a framework for collaborative authoring of a store of documents.
Finally in Chapter 9, authors show how the current state of WebServices’ description and automatic code generation supposed to work and does work in simple cases.
Download Google, Amazon and Beyond: Creating and Consuming Web Services
