seekda Web Services Blogs

At seekda our developers never sleep… That statement is maybe an exaggeration , but the truth is that while lots of seekda development effort is currently committed to development of Web Services marketplace (read about seekda innovation in our about section), we continue to enhance the existing Web Services search engine portal with many new and useful features.

With our recent deployment, the history of viewed Web Services is now available to you from the context menu. It remains invisible until you browse for the first time the page of a particular Web Services. Once you find your first Web Service, the history box gets activated in the left context menu.
Continue reading “Recently Viewed Web Services” »

Since March 2008 seekda users can test every Web Services found at seekda using our online Web Service Tester. We have presented the Web Service Tester in our March article. Basically the seekda Web Service Tester enables to quickly check whether a particular Web Service is exactly doing what you want without writing a single line of code.

The data collected on how often a Web Services is used gives us some indication of its usefulness. Since we believe this can also be interesting for both consumer and providers of Web Services, we have created a special page with these Web Services that have been tested most often. The number of tests by different users is one of many criteria which influences our ranking: we also keep track of how often a service is viewed or commented on, as well as take its availability (read about details in Monitoring the Availability of Web Services article) into consideration.

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” »

Since we have released the initial version of our Web Service Tester, we have implemented a series of bug fixes and additional features. From now on you are able to use the seekda Web Service Tester also without opening an account with us. Only if you are using this service on a regular basis, you will need to login to do an unlimited number of invocations.

One of the new features we have introduced is the support of the XML schema data type base64Binary. If you wonder when you need it, here is one quick example of a service that uses this data type to enable you to upload files:
Continue reading “Web Service Tester Freely Available” »

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” »

Many of the current Web Service repositories suffer from outdated data. We at seekda avoid this by regularly verifying the connectivity of all services in our repository. Additionally, our long term monitoring database allows us to provide you with a useful service ranking and helps you to pick the right service for your purpose.

Instead of showing you just the current status, we record and show the status for every single service from the time we found it. For example, take a look at the RuleReasoning service a research related service offered by University of Innsbruck, Austria.

Continue reading “Monitoring the Availability of Web Services” »

Our search engine provides you access to more then 20 000 Web Services. Our ranking algorithm considers service availability, quality of the service documentation and other metrics to give you the most relevant results first. However in order to decide whether a particular Web Service is exactly doing what you want, in many cases you will need to try it out. Our Web Service Tester enables you to do this quickly without needing to write a line of code. The Web Service tester generates Web based forms, allowing you to invoke any WSDL based Web Service on the Web.

During an initial testing phase the service is available as private beta for registered users. Try for example the GlobalWeather service (provided by webservicex.net) which gives you the current weather for all major cities around the world, or the iplookup service (provided by ippages.com) that provides detailed information for a specific internet address. If you don’t have an account with seekda yet, register now - registration will take you less then a minute.
Continue reading “Web Service Tester Online” »

Several month ago we have launched an initial beta version of our Web Service search engine. We have today moved the search to our new company home seekda.com.

To see our Search Engine in action, join those who already participate in our private beta and sign up today.