Real World Web Services (Paperback)

by Will Iverson (Author)
Key Phrases: optional attributes search, public boolean update, web service data, Gathering Web Service Data, Java Geeks, Competitive Analysis (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product 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.

About the Author
Will Iverson has been working in the computer & information technology field professionally since 1990. His diverse background includes developing statistical applications for use analyzing data from the NASA Space Shuttle, product management for Apple Computer, developer relations for Symantec's VisualCaf, running an independent J2EE consulting company, and now helping build BEA's dev2dev developer web site. Will lives in Union City, California.

Product Details

• Paperback: 222 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; illustrated edition edition (October 4, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 059600642X
• ISBN-13: 978-0596006426
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #264,607 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nicely done, excellent code examples, November 3, 2004

By	E. Wuehler (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I think the book will appeal to two groups. Those people who want to use a web service from a company described in the book and people who are interested in learning about some real world applications using web services. The number of companies discussed are few, but they are the big players. I liked the discussion of web services in general and how they can be (and are) used in real world applications.

This book shows you - with copious amounts of code - how to use various services provided by real companies right away. For me, this book was a great way to gather ideas about different approaches to provide and interact with web services. It does a great job at proving how simple web services really are.

Although web services are not language-specific, the book and all the examples are in Java. You should be pretty comfortable with Java, Tomcat, and similar technologies to be able to get the examples working. The companies/web services discussed are: Amazon, eBay, Google, FedEx, PayPal, CDDB. It also discusses interacting with bloggers.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Short, sweet, practical web service examples, November 6, 2004

By	Jack D. Herrington "engineer and author" (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This book is mainly code applied to several web services case studies. There is an introductory segment at the beginning which has some nice illustrations. After that the book uses a combination of Java code and screenshots to demonstrate eight example uses of web services. The most handy one, in my opinion, is the News Aggegator, which uses web services to retrieve information from sites like Amazon. Then it turns that information into RSS so that you can retrieve it with your news reader.

There is a lot more code than text in this book. If you learn well by looking at code then this book should work for you. This book is a little looser than the O'Reilly standard. There are more screenshots than usual, the UML graphics are not as well done as usual, and the code is not as well annotated. That being said, it's a fun and informative read that finally injects a little reality into the web services hype.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars entirely adequate -- useful even -- level headed, December 7, 2004

By	Visionary Hacker (Kansas City, MO USA) - See all my reviews

Real World Web Services starts with a recitation of the history of the internet, then
discuses some of the web service offerings currently available, including Java code
for programming remote procdure calls to them, then concludes with a short visionary
chapter in which the author relaxes his prohibition against opinionating and speculating.

The discussion of N-tier architecture, and the checklist of things to be careful about,
when considering deployment of a web service, and the nod to capitalist realities -- if
you don't have a business plan, you're just playing around, not like that's bad or anything,
but the angels aren't going to kidnap you and issue you your very own beach house -- are
most useful, and come from a solid perpective.

How do you choose between raw CGI, SOAP, REST, binary, and XML? What are
the good points and drawbacks of each? Real World Web Services discusses these
generalities. Is UDDI worth the trouble when WDSL already comes with commercial
SOAP development tools? Real world web services will tell you, probably not.

As a developer of web services since before the term had been coined, I tend to
use the traditional Comman Gateway Interface key/value pairs data declaration
method for passing data to my web services rather than XML. Iverson touches on
this legacy method, in a box, on page 99, while discussing PayPal's Instant Payment
Notification system: "Using a simple HTTP request/response is perhaps the most basic,
universal web service. It works with virtually every programming language and requires no
special configuration to use. It's a classic case of the simple solution being the best
solution."

There is no further discussion of simple HTTP request/response, also known as
"common gateway interface." Perhaps he wishes to discourage reinventing too
many wheels, when the available ones (SOAP) take care of a mess of details.

I suppose the plentiful Java example code will be welcome to fans of Iverson's previous
books on Jakarta and J2EE