PUBLIC MARKS from mbertier with tag "web services"

Ironically, it’s usually easier to reuse publicly-available libraries (e.g. open-source libs on sourceforge) and public web services than those in the same company. The following things make reuse more digestible in an enterprise setting:

Simple Asynchronous Messaging (SAM) allows PHP applications to send and receive messages to a number of different Messaging and Queuing middleware systems through a very simple interface.

WebInject is a free tool for automated testing of web applications and web services. It can be used to test individual system components that have HTTP interfaces (JSP, ASP, CGI, PHP, Servlets, HTML Forms, XML/SOAP Web Services, etc), and can be used as a test harness to create a suite of [HTTP level] automated functional, acceptance, and regression tests. A test harness, also referred to as a test driver or a test framework, allows you to run many test cases and collect/report your results. WebInject offers real-time results display and may also be used for monitoring system response times.

Ah, so if these issues just turn out to be misunderstandings on your part then Microsoft will just use the APP and not roll out its own protocol? I'm so glad to hear that.

Joe Gregorio answered some questions about WADL in his post "Do we need WADL?". Also note that Leonard Richardson has chimed in recently on the WADL issue. And I of course have some different thoughts. :-)

Besides all these negative points, there are very strong positive points as well. OK, SOAP/WSDL might not be the best choice for every application, but for many at least it is a not so bad one. And even if code generation does not always work perfectly, it usually saves a lot of work. There is just this feeling that there should be something simpler, more straight-forward, and more intuitive. And then REST enters the stage. It is not that REST by definition is easier than SOAP/WSDL. In fact, for machines it is not easier at all.

Last week, Google's Thomas Steiner unveiled that he is working on a Google project for generating language specific client libraries from WADL and generating WADL from documentation examples, tentatively called Google REST Compile and Google REST Describe. Thomas chose WADL as the description language to be used with the new tool, after examining all the alternatives

If there are many clients then the demands for caching semantics will be begin to dominate. In that case you need to abandon HTTP as just a simple transport and start using the application level semantics of HTTP to start leveraging the caching architecture already built into the Internet.

This is like asking Karl Rove and Dick Cheney to write the Democratic Party platform.

Simplicity is a virtue. And in software development, it's an essential virtue. The venerable Jargon File has long had a particularly good adjective for systems that aren't simple: They are baroque.

As of December 5, 2006, we are no longer actively supporting the SOAP Search API.

Users and software agents should be able to discover, invoke, compose, and monitor Web resources offering particular services and having particular properties, and should be able to do so with a high degree of automation if desired. Powerful tools should be enabled by service descriptions, across the Web service lifecycle. OWL-S (formerly DAML-S) is an ontology of services that makes these functionalities possible. In this submission we describe the overall structure of the ontology and its three main parts: the service profile for advertising and discovering services; the process model, which gives a detailed description of a service's operation; and the grounding, which provides details on how to interoperate with a service, via messages.

by Joe Gregorio

The small community that is coalescing around REST/HTTP should prioritize the following objectives above anything else at this point: 1. Raise awareness of what HTTP is capable of. 2. Fix the tools.

This page is a discussion of the strengths, weaknesses and implementations of the HTTP GET/POST binding for WSDL. This binding is fairly good but is lacking some features that would make it useful for sophisticated real-world web services.

This page provides links to a number of works on using and describing REST services.

SCA allows you to turn PHP classes into Web services by adding a few simple phpDocumentor-style annotations. SCA will automatically generate WSDL for these services when required. SCA also uses the same annotations technique to allow PHP classes to declare dependencies on other Web services or PHP classes. At runtime it will then 'inject' proxies for these dependencies, which can then be used to call the Web services or classes

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate Artificial Artificial Intelligence directly into their processing by making requests of humans.

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