| | |  | Computer Security | Home » » Real World Web Services | | | | | | | Description: | | The core idea behind Real World Web Services is simple: after years of hype, what are the major players really doing with web services? Standard bodies may wrangle and platform vendors may preach, but at the end of the day what are the technologies that are actually in use, and how can developers incorporate them into their own applications? Those are the answers Real World Web Services delivers. It's a field guide to the wild and wooly world of non-trivial deployed web services. The heart of the book is a series of projects, demonstrating the use and integration of Google, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, FedEx, and many more web services. Some of these vendors have been extremely successful with their web service deployments: for example, eBay processes over a billion web service requests a month!
The author focuses on building 8 fully worked out example web applications that incorporate the best web services available today. The book thoroughly documents how to add functionality like automating listings for auctions, dynamically calculating shipping fees, automatically sending faxes to your suppliers, using an aggregator to pull data from multiple news and web service feeds into a single format or monitoring the latest weblog discussions and Google searches to keep web site visitors on top of topics of interest-by integrating APIs from popular websites most people are already familiar with. For each example application, the author provides a thorough overview, architecture, and full working code examples. This book doesn't engage in an intellectual debate as to the correctness of web services on a theological level. Instead, it focuses on the practical, real world usage of web services as the latest evolution in distributed computing, allowing for structured communication via Internet protocols. As you ll see, this includes everything from sending HTTP GET commands to retrieving an XML document through the use of SOAP and various vendor SDKs.
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Will Iverson | | Paperback:
| 222 pages | | Publisher:
| O'Reilly Media | | Publication Date:
| October 11, 2004 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 059600642X | | Product Length:
| 9.32 inches | | Product Width:
| 7.08 inches | | Product Height:
| 0.54 inches | | Product Weight:
| 0.82 pounds | | Package Length:
| 9.1 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.0 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.5 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.85 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 10 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 10 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 17 found the following review helpful:
 Nicely done, excellent code examplesNov 04, 2004
By Eric Wuehler
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.
12 of 13 found the following review helpful:
entirely adequate -- useful even -- level headedDec 07, 2004
By Visionary Hacker
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
18 of 21 found the following review helpful:
Short, sweet, practical web service examplesNov 07, 2004
By Jack D. Herrington
"engineer and author"
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.
11 of 12 found the following review helpful:
 Great bridge from theory to practical...Feb 14, 2005
By Thomas Duff
"Duffbert"
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...
7 of 7 found the following review helpful:
 Decent BookMar 16, 2006
By B. Anderson
"B. Anderson"
Real World Web Services by Will Iverson is more of a "here's an example of something someone might want to do" type book. The book contains a lot of Java source code to connect to some web services from big names like eBay, Google, and FedEx. Whether these examples are useful or whether the reader can glean out other uses of the code depends on the skill the reader has in programming. The book also goes over some basic concepts and tools the reader can use to get started with web services. All in all, Real World Web Services will give you a taste of what web services are, yet leaves out the low level details of how it works.
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