Web Services Consumers
Web Services have been created around the notion that it is easier to discover and leverage somebody else's service, rather than to write your own from scratch. You need to commit fewer resources to create an application utilizing a service or composition of services than to develop all the functionality yourself. The idea of Web Services was to create a standard interface, programming model and description language that would allow seamless integration between very different systems. Indeed, today service consumers can already leverage public services across the Internet, which are functionally equivalent to the services being hosted by local systems.
Web Services are becoming a very important component of Web 2.0 and Web APIs. They are providing an ability to mashup services developed outside of your organization to be used within your own web portal or enterprise applications. You might ask yourself: Why use services from the Web rather than host this functionality locally? Well, firstly, if service consumers leverage somebody else’s services they do not commit their own resources required to write such a service from scratch. Secondly, Web Services technologies allow consumers to benefit from services that somebody is always monitoring and managing so they do not have to maintain them themselves. This is much more than you can say about traditional enterprise systems, where your technical team must take care of every single malfunction or failure.
seekda is becoming a one-stop shopping and management mechanism for those looking to buy and consume public Web Services. At the Web Services marketplace, which is being developed by seekda, you can find the services you need, consume free Web Services or buy credits for paid services, and connect them to your application, thus benefiting from not having to develop this functionality in-house. The seekda Web Services Marketplace remains under construction and is presently undergoing a testing phase, however seekda already provides the most comprehensive Web Services Search Engine in the world to help find the services you need. With seekda you can:
- Search Web Services: do simple search by a keyword or use the advanced search, which allows you to find and then select Web Services by country or domain. You can also browse services that we have classified according to several other criteria such as: tag cloud, country of origin, recently found services or the most used ones.
- Use Web Services immediately: use seekda’s innovative Web Service Tester – you can try Web Services online and learn how they work. Get an unfiltered idea about quality of particular Web Services without writing a single line of program code.
We also invite you to help us building the Web of services (as an extension to a Web of pages). To accomplish this task, we need support of Web Service consumers in:
- Reviewing Web Services and their respective Providers. Please have a look at service descriptions, their availability and their interface definitions. Search for Web Services at seekda and build your composite applications. Using our social community features, such as the wiki, you can share your experience of services and providers with us and other users. Let the community know how services that you found at seekda worked for you.
- Tagging and Annotating Web Services. Please tag your search results. It will help us classify services, while at the same time it can help you and other users find relevant Web Services more quickly and easily.
The adoption of Web Services as a mashup technology allows change to occur at a pace faster than anything we have seen in the industry so far. There is no longer a need to write subsystems of your own applications, as many of the components already exist. Re-using existing functionality is a traditional idea in computing. When using public Web Services you will not have to change your application too much, just simplify what you have been doing. You can save lots of time in the application development process allowing your organization, regardless of its size, to become more agile and to be much more cost effective.
If you are a newbie and you would simply like to see Web Services in practice in order to understand what the benefits to your organization would be and without investing a lot of time in studying all the in and outs of SOAP and WSDL protocols, then we have prepared some introductory Web Services tutorials for you. We also publish regular articles regarding new features as they are getting released.
So explore seekda to find out what we can do for you and your organization!
