We keep discovering new potential applications for seekda’s Web Services Search engine. Markus Noebauer has used our engine in his Mobile Service Locator plugin for the Mobile Scenario Presenter (MSP/L). The Mobile Scenario Presenter, which is a Requirement Engineering tool, aims to provide a simple frontend allowing interacting with Web Services. The MSL, which supports service discovery through seekda engine, was developed to run on a mobile platform such as a pocket PC.
We have been very much impressed by the video produced by the Service Web 3.0 project consortium and we decide to share it with our own visitors. In order to explain, promote, and attract new contributions, the consortium created a video to be viewed by non-experts about next generation of the Internet. We would not manage to produce a better video ourselves and we believe that this is probably these days the best movie explaining to non-experts of how the Web of Services (promoted also so much by seekda) could look like in the near future.
seekda continues to expand its technological leadership in the field of Web Service and e-commerce technologies through its research projects. Together with the Service-Finder consortium, which consist of prominent research organizations such as CEFRIEL, Ontoprise and University of Sheffield we would like to announce the release of the alpha version of the Service-Finder portal for Web Service discovery. Service-Finder project aims at developing a platform for service discovery in which Web Services are embedded in a Web 2.0 environment. Service-Finder portal has been build up on a comparable set of public Web Service descriptions as the ones available at seekda portal. The prototype provides extensions with semantic annotations (e.g. categorization) and Web 2.0 features. On the current alpha version of the portal users can search for services by doing free-text search or by browsing categories and/or tags. Once the Service-Finder technology is consolidated, seekda aims at integrating it into its own portal.
seekda’s Web Services Invoker (called by us also in the past the Web Services Tester) has gone through a set of considerable improvements. We decided that the user-friendly and easy to use invoker would be more than ever a priority. With this new release we focused to a greater extent on improving the graphical presentation of information available to our users. Also the interaction between a service and a user should now improve extensively. Continue reading “Improved Web Services Invoker” »
Web Service Ideas Contest was a competition in which participants used their imagination to envision how real world problems could be solved with Web Service technologies. Participants shared with seekda their ideas of how services could be used in completely new contexts. The contest took place in September 2008 and we announced winners on the 10th of October. We thank all participants for sharing their great ideas. We plan to further collaborate with selected ones on these initial ideas.
See the original call and the results of the competition at contest page.
Are you a Web Service Technology Expert or do you have the ultimate plan how to realize a phenomenal Web API? Do you enjoy discovering new ways of using service technologies or addressing real-world technical challenges of modern distributed applications? Then enter seekda’s Web Service Ideas Contest and win a notebook or an iPod!
Web Service Ideas Contest is a competition in which you use your imagination to envision how real world problems can be solved with Web Service technologies. Take part in our contest and let us know about your ideas of how services could be used in completely new contexts. To win a notebook you simply have to describe what your conceived Web Service should be able to do and who might use it for what purpose.
Here’s how it works: All you need is to login (or register) and fill out the submission form. You will have till the 26th of September to describe your idea for a great service.
Now you have one more possibility to get in touch with us, to offer us your feedback and to help us improve everything we do. To get instantaneous answers to your questions, just follow the chat link visible on the top of the right menu on most pages (e.g. http://seekda.com). The link will be only visible if one of our team members is actually online. When initiating a chat you will be put in a queue and unless we are in the middle of the night in Europe (although many of us work also at night, so you can always give it a try), you will be connected directly to one of us. We will be more than happy to answer any of your questions. Continue reading “Get in Touch with Us in Real Time” »
UDDI was proposed as a solution to publish and search services. UDDI defines data structures relevant to service discovery and a set of APIs to access them. The standard was supported by major software vendors such as IBM, Microsoft and SAP. Although UDDI was claimed to become successful in restricted and controlled environments (there are several implementations of UDDI servers available for the internal use these days), it has not prevailed in the domain of publicly available Web Services (you can read more about shutdown of IBM, Microsoft and SAP public UDDI registries and many articles discussing this topic as old as 2004, just to mention some of them for reference from pluralsight, techtarget or realworldsoa at inforworld).
We are frequently asked by users of seekda Web Services search engine if seekda develops or aims to develop a public UDDI registry. To be more specific what people really mean are UDDI APIs allowing to access seekda in a programmatic way. The short answer is that we are neither doing nor planning to do so in a short term. However at the same time we believe that we can learn a lot from the work done by UDDI designers and creators of public UDDI registries. We do not completely neglect the future possibility of implementing the standardized UDDI APIs (or ebXML registry APIs). Anyway at this stage we do not consider UDDI APIs as a very essential feature which would improve search for public Web Services and the exponential growth of Web of services. Continue reading “The Fairytale of UDDI Registry and Public Web Services” »
When I am reading about mashups, I am getting often an impression that REST folks are trying to take over this term and restrict it mainly to REST based services. Equally at the same time in the Web Services community we got used to hear about Web Services composition, but not really about Web Services mashups (although there are of course exceptions). While both terms are not really equivalent, there are some overlaps and basically there is nothing preventing us from using Web Services to provide appealing mashups for Web applications. At seekda we strongly support the idea that Web APIs should be based not on one, but on different technologies. We can successfully mashup Web Services and REST services together to compose good Web applications so in our opinion the discussion about superiority of one technology over the other is quite pointless. The user is important and a new functionality we can provide to him or her; not really the technology or terminology, which have been used by particular communities. In this new series of tutorials, which I will call “Services by Example”, I will be mashing up (composing) various Web APIs to show how in a couple of simple steps to deliver mashups, which could not be produced, when using standard software libraries. Today I will show how to make a useful application composed of Web Services coming from two different service providers. Continue reading “Services by Example: Web Services Composition” »
