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” »
Lets dive into our second part of demystifying Web Services tutorial and writing your first (second :)) Web Services Client (you might want to read first part 1 about Finding and Testing Web Services Tutorial). Again, I do not want to show you how to write a new Web Service, as I personally believe that it is more motivational for a new user of Web Services technologies to use existing service to grasp an idea of them, rather than to write services themselves. That is why we will find and use an existing Web Service and write some useful Web application. I will use for this tutorial Java, Tomcat and Eclipse. If you have these installed on your machine, then in 10-15 minutes you should have your application up and running. Otherwise you have to reserve more time to download and install required components. Anyway, once you are done with installations, the practical part of this tutorial will be very short as I have cut everything to absolute minimum. I want you to use Web Services, not to waste your time on understanding bits and bytes of their particular protocols (this you can find yourself in WSDL and SOAP specifications and various more advanced tutorials available on the Web).
Continue reading “Write Your First Web Services Client Part 2: Using Services” »
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” »
