Real World Web Services

Rating:
Summary: not what I was hoping for
Review:
I was very disappointed with this book. I was hoping for something that would go into detail of the various Web Services solutions offered by Amazon, Google, etc. Instead it is just another Java book filled with mostly code (is it a sin to use prose anymore?) and lacking in any kind of detailed discussion at all. It basically talks about very specific problems, offers some code, then moves on to another specific solution. I found it completely uninteresting.

The only person I would suggest this book for is someone who wants code to Cut and Paste without really understanding what they are doing. And good luck to them ;-)

Rating:
Summary: can be easily understood
Review: Hurray. At last. A slender book that tries to show you the essence of Web Services, in as simple a fashion as possible. Unlike much larger texts on this subject, Iverson eshews a comprehensive approach. Instead, he strives to describe the gist of WS.

He gives this substance by showing how to hook into the WS APIs published by eBay, Google, Amazon and FedEx, to build a composite WS. This modular approach to constructing from independent sources is the driving force behind WS. The code examples are necessarily verbose. But not really that intricate. Here is your chance to be demystified about WS. Now if you find afterwards that you still want to continue, then you're probably ready, and need, one of those other texts.

Rating:
Summary: Nicely done, excellent code examples
Review: I think the book will appeal to two groups. Those people who want to use a web service from a company described in the book and people who are interested in learning about some real world applications using web services. The number of companies discussed are few, but they are the big players. I liked the discussion of web services in general and how they can be (and are) used in real world applications.

This book shows you - with copious amounts of code - how to use various services provided by real companies right away. For me, this book was a great way to gather ideas about different approaches to provide and interact with web services. It does a great job at proving how simple web services really are.

Although web services are not language-specific, the book and all the examples are in Java. You should be pretty comfortable with Java, Tomcat, and similar technologies to be able to get the examples working. The companies/web services discussed are: Amazon, eBay, Google, FedEx, PayPal, CDDB. It also discusses interacting with bloggers.

Rating:
Summary: entirely adequate -- useful even -- level headed
Review: Real World Web Services starts with a recitation of the history of the internet, then
discuses some of the web service offerings currently available, including Java code
for programming remote procdure calls to them, then concludes with a short visionary
chapter in which the author relaxes his prohibition against opinionating and speculating.

The discussion of N-tier architecture, and the checklist of things to be careful about,
when considering deployment of a web service, and the nod to capitalist realities -- if
you don't have a business plan, you're just playing around, not like that's bad or anything,
but the angels aren't going to kidnap you and issue you your very own beach house -- are
most useful, and come from a solid perpective.

How do you choose between raw CGI, SOAP, REST, binary, and XML? What are
the good points and drawbacks of each? Real World Web Services discusses these
generalities. Is UDDI worth the trouble when WDSL already comes with commercial
SOAP development tools? Real world web services will tell you, probably not.

As a developer of web services since before the term had been coined, I tend to
use the traditional Comman Gateway Interface key/value pairs data declaration
method for passing data to my web services rather than XML. Iverson touches on
this legacy method, in a box, on page 99, while discussing PayPal's Instant Payment
Notification system: "Using a simple HTTP request/response is perhaps the most basic,
universal web service. It works with virtually every programming language and requires no
special configuration to use. It's a classic case of the simple solution being the best
solution."

There is no further discussion of simple HTTP request/response, also known as
"common gateway interface." Perhaps he wishes to discourage reinventing too
many wheels, when the available ones (SOAP) take care of a mess of details.

I suppose the plentiful Java example code will be welcome to fans of Iverson's previous
books on Jakarta and J2EE

Rating:
Summary: Great bridge from theory to practical...
Review: Since Domino 7 will start to incorporate web services more readily into application development, I figured it was time to start getting a little more versed on the subject. To that end, I got a copy of Real World Web Services by Will Iverson (O'Reilly). Coupled with a detailed tutorial/reference manual, this is a really good selection.

Chapter List: Web Service Evolution; Foundations of Web Services; Development Platform; Project 1: Competitive Analysis; Project 2: Auctions and Shipping; Project 3: Billing and Faxing; Project 4: Syndicated Search; Project 5: News Aggregator; Project 6: Audio CD Catalog; Project 7: Hot News Sheet; Project 8: Automatic Daily Discussions; Future Web Service Directions; Index

While the book is smallish (206 pages), there's a lot of value packed in it. Iverson takes you from the beginning of simple HTTP request and responses, through data scrapping, into RPC technology, and then finally into web services. The overview really helps you to understand how we got to where we are. He explains how to set up a simple test development environment as well as what you'll need, and then it's directly into the example projects. Here's where the book shines. These projects connect to live data sources such as Amazon, Google, FedEx, and eBay, so you're not dealing with simple examples that don't translate to the real world. Each of the projects are applications that you could easily see yourself using on a daily basis, either exactly as written or with some moderate tweaking. And since you're learning the mechanics of connecting with that service, it's easy to extrapolate the information into the areas that might interest you more.

If you have no background in SOAP or WSDL, I'd recommend you get a foundational book that has a good tutorial and reference material. You won't get it from this book, nor should you expect to. It's not his intended purpose for the book. But this is the book that will help you go from theoretical to practical, and that's worth its weight in gold.

Very good book if you're looking to take the next step in your web services development...

Rating:
Summary: Stuff that really works.
Review: Then the world got more complex. We started connecting the web to databases so that much bigger sites could be developed with huge amounts of data. ==Then we wanted to do eCommerce, and we needed a way to do credit card validation. So our servers talked not only to our database but connected to some other system to get data about the credit card's validity and to deposit the money received.

There have become a huge number of web services available. To list just a few, there's Amazon, eBay, Google, FedEx, Pay Pal, InterFAX. From a web site you can link to these sites and get information from them that you can then integrate into your own site.

With this huge number of web services that have become available, there have become a new set of problems. Which services, which interfaces work in the real world? ==In this book, Will Iverson presents his experiences with several real world, actually operating web services. He provides detailed examples of contacting several big web sites including the programming necessary to interface to them.

This book is written for the Java journeyman. To quote from Chapter 3, "You should be familiar with basic object-oriented development, know how to add libraries to your class path, understand TCP/IP and basic networking, and be familiar with basic JSP-based web application development.

I'm not. I use Cold Fusion to do my web programming. I found the descriptions in the book entirely adequate to get me started in programming what I needed. I'm glad he did the programming because that proved that the services worked. What's important in this book is not the programming, it's the real world experience of what's really working right now out there in the real world.

Rating:
Summary: Short, sweet, practical web service examples
Review: This book is mainly code applied to several web services case studies. There is an introductory segment at the beginning which has some nice illustrations. After that the book uses a combination of Java code and screenshots to demonstrate eight example uses of web services. The most handy one, in my opinion, is the News Aggegator, which uses web services to retrieve information from sites like Amazon. Then it turns that information into RSS so that you can retrieve it with your news reader.

There is a lot more code than text in this book. If you learn well by looking at code then this book should work for you. This book is a little looser than the O'Reilly standard. There are more screenshots than usual, the UML graphics are not as well done as usual, and the code is not as well annotated. That being said, it's a fun and informative read that finally injects a little reality into the web services hype.