Archive for February, 2008

I have realized that most of the available tutorials about Web Services for newbies show how to write a first Web Service example (usually “Hello World”, or a fake “Currency Exchange”), deploy it on the local server and next how to write a Web Services client for it, but actually not really how to use existing Web Services, which are already available on the Web. Is this really what a newcomer expects to learn when hearing for the first time about Web Services technologies such as XML, SOAP or WSDL? How to write fake services, which are not of any practical use for his/her applications or get confused with XML details? I do not really think so! Also because of this approach, newbies might have a perception that Web Services technologies are unnecessary complicated and difficult, not worth of investing their time. At the end of the day if I have to write all this code myself to get a Web Service example up and running, is it not simply a better idea to connect directly to my own database, write my own class, java bean or anything what is simple, instead of using Web Services. So lets try to make a practical 2 minutes Web Services tutorial for newbies, which actually delivers something real, which cannot be extracted from the local database or coded in an internal class of the application. And the most important, lets use not fake ones, but real Web Services!
Continue reading “Write Your First Web Services Client Part 1: Finding and Testing Services” »

… just got the following mail from an enthusiastic seekda user:

I am a researcher and a developer involved in a couple of EU projects. In one of the projects, specifically SWING (Semantic Web Services Interoperability for Geospatial Decision Making, FP6 STREP, http://www.swing-project.org), I needed to translate several words (ontology concept names, to be more specific) from English to some other language (e.g. French). Automatically, of course. First I tought it will take me at least a weak to get some machine translation lib figured out but it actually took me only two minutes with seekda I simply typed in the query “translation” and selected one of the listed Web services. I created the stub for C# and wrote these few lines of code:

public static void Main()  {
   TranslationMode transl_mode_obj = new TranslationMode();
   transl_mode_obj.ObjectID = "en_de";
   TranslationService transl_srv = new TranslationService();
   Console.WriteLine(transl_srv.Translate(transl_mode_obj,  "Seekda is extremely useful!"));
}

When I ran it, I got the following output:
Continue reading “Finding a Translation Service” »