Press Release
November 2, 2004
"Real World Web Services": Your Field Guide to the Wild and Woolly World of Non-Trivial Deployed Web Services
Sebastopol, CA--After years of seemingly endless hype surrounding the
promise of web services, the question still remains: what are the major
players really doing with web services? What are the technologies that
are actually in use, and how can developers incorporate them into their
own applications? According to Will Iverson, author of Real World Web
Services (O'Reilly, US $29.95), even the outwardly simple question, "What
are web services?" can be answered in a number of ways, few of which are
incorrect. "Much of this is because the typical conversation about web
services suffers from the blending of several distinct concepts," Iverson
points out. "Most software developers focus on the technical underpinnings
that make communication possible (such as SOAP and XML-RPC). Others add
developer infrastructure, such as the Web Services Description Language
(WSDL). Some others include a wide host of other pieces, including a
mind-numbing array of standards--some real, some theoretical."
Iverson asks readers to think of Real World Web Services as a field
guide to the wild and woolly world of non-trivial deployed web services.
The heart of the book is a series of projects that demonstrate 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. As Iverson notes, eBay, for example, processes
more than a billion web service requests a month.
In Real World Web Services, Iverson dispenses with the idea that just
because something is a specification, it must be used. Instead, he trains
a practical and frequently critical eye to the problems facing Java
developers, focusing on the use of working web service APIs. The result
is a clear, concise guidebook for developers seeking to make use of the
power of today's best web service options.
Real World Web Services guides developers through the building of eight
web applications. The book documents how to add functionality like
automating listings for auctions, dynamically calculating shipping fees,
automatically sending faxes to 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 current with topics of interest. For each example
application, Iverson 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. Readers will see that this includes everything from sending
HTTP GET commands to retrieving an XML document through the use of SOAP
and various vendor SDKs.
Additional Resources:
Real World Web Services
Will Iverson
ISBN 0-596-00642-X, 207 pages, $29.95 US, $43.95 CA
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938; 1-707-827-7000
About O'Reilly
O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.
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