seekda Web Services Blogs

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.