Category: Web Services

Phil Windley on enterprise storage:

If someone’s going to store sensative data, they ought to use the best techniques available, not the same ones my Aunt uses to store her recipes.

Aaron Swartz waxes philosophical on the Jon Postel phrase “Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.”

It seems to me that a well-designed protocol would have only one saying things and require that you use it. After all, there are two types of interfaces: good interfaces and user interfaces. (There is actually a third type, as demonstrated by XML: bad interfaces, which are neither good for computers nor users. It never ceases to amaze me how XML is bad at everything.)

I can’t say that I agree, but it is definately a point of view.  I think that there’s lots of hype around XML, but it does serve its purpose.  It may not be easily human readable, not easily computer readable (or without headaches), but it might be the lowest common denominator.

While I was running around shopping yesterday, I stumbled across Sony’s DSC-U10.  I think that it is potentially a really cool subcompact digital camera.  The thing is tiny.  The only downsides to it that I can see are the lack of an optical viewfinder (not the end of the world) and no optical zoom (understandable given its size).  It’s priced right too: $199 for a tiny, sleek 1.3 megapixel camera that feels good in your hands.  Yeah, there are cheaper 1.3 megapixel cameras out there, but they tend to feel quite cheap, while this does not.  It does have a built in flash, which some of my el-cheapo toy digital cameras lack.

I’m not quite sure if this will end up on my ‘things to wase money on’ list or not, but it’s a sweet little camera.  (There’s also a 2 megapixel version of the camera if you want a little more rez.)

On this day four years ago, DPReview opened their doors.

I have not had a chance to play any video games lately, but America’s Army 1.5.0 has been released.  It looks like the major thing in this version (besides bugfixes and tweaks, of course) is an expanded Weapons Cache map which they claim is almost twice as big.  Hopefully that will rock, as Weapons Cache is my favorite newer map.

This morning, Slashdot linked to a ball pc, something that I (and Slashdot Japan) mentioned over a week ago.

Old news for nerds, stuff that mattered last week.

Sam Ruby allows us to validate our RSS with SOAP:

Well now you can.  Simply POST your feed to the RSS Validator.  Since this code is liberal in what it accepts, neither a SOAP Envelope nor a SOAP Body is required.  Since it is conservative in what it does, you will always receive either a fully compliant SOAP response or a SOAP fault back.

Someone made it to my weblog by a google query of matt croyden.  Croyden is the most common misspelling of my last name, by the way.  It’s understandable but amusing.

Thanks to google for picking that one up.  Did you mean: matt croydon  Let’s hope that this post doesn’t mess that up.

John Burkhardt:

Wow, nobody told me about this nifty GWS page on www.groove.net.  We even have this nifty graphic diagrams and stuff.  And a white paper!  It often doesn’t occur to me to surf our own web site, but I often learn quite a lot there!

Yep.  Read company website semi-regularly.  Check.

Sam Ruby: SOAP By Example.  Hey Sam, I’d love to see you give a Python Web Services talk or something wicked like that at PyCon.  I’ll have to bug you and Mark about that on Monday.

CNet:

Software maker Iona Technologies will seek to do an end run around Java application server companies with the release next year of a software integration server built around Web services technology.

Early & Adopter Weblog: Windows .NET Server (WNS), why should you care?

Here are some major points, but the details on Sean & Scott’s weblog is great:

• IIS 6.0
• the entire IIS metabase is now just an XML file
• COM+ 1.5
• .NET framework 1.1
• And a monkey

Well, the monkey part is mine, but it looks like lots of cool stuff going into WNS.  I still need to get around to downloading RC2 so I can play with it.

Jon Udell: Nobody expects the spontaneous integration (Infoworld).

Clemens Vasters is on top of it as always:

One step closer. SOAP 1.2 has reached W3C candidate recommendation status. Primer, Part 1, Part 2.

Xmlhack:

Roger Costello and David Jacobs have announced a project to collaboratively develop a distributed registry technology for web services as an alternative to UDDI or ebXML’s centralized strategies.

The project has a home page that describes it more fully, including details of design goals and a mailing list.

All buzzwords aside, making sure that a web services directory/registry is distributed is good.  It means that nobody controls it, that it can’t easily be attacked, and it’s not going to put huge strains on any one set of resources.  Good stuff.  Here’s another thing to keep an eye on.

More O’Reilly goodness this evening:

Configuring Tomcat with IIS Web Server by James Goodwill:

In this article, we are going to continue our Tomcat Connector discussions with a look at how to configure Tomcat and Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) using the JK v1.2 Connectors.

Introducing MDIP 2.0 by Timothy Appnel:

The J2ME Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) specification was introduced just over two years ago to provide an open development platform for resource-constrained networked devices, such as commercial mobile phones. Since its introduction, the MIDP profile is proving to be the leading technology platform worldwide for developing this brand of mobile applications. Supporters include mobile carriers from around the world, including NTT DoCoMo, Sprint, and Vodafone, in addition to device manufacturers like Nokia, Motorola, and Research In Motion. The November 2002 release of version 2.0 of the specification introduced substantial new capabilities to the base platform that will enable developers to create more effective and powerful applications with less effort.

From XML-RPC to SOAP: A Migration Guide, by Rich Salz:

As you might expect from the name, XML-RPC is a way of using XML to send classic Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) over the net. XML-RPC’s use of XML is very simple. It doesn’t use namespaces. It doesn’t even use attributes.

My thoughts are (in decending order): Sometimes you need Tomcat to play nice with IIS, MIDP 2.0 looks promising, and there are some things that XML-RPC is still good for, though SOAP is getting easier to use.  With my experiences, it has been much easier to do SOAP calls in .NET than Java, but it wasn’t particularly hard in Java, it was just more CLI and less WYSIWYG.

Jon Udell brings up some interesting issues with his latest LibraryLookup notes.  There are definately problems with using ISBNs to search.  You can read Jon’s post for details, but a single title can have multiple ISBNs (hardcover, paperback, editions, etc).  Here is one specific problem that Jon notes:

Another is that, book titles being non-unique, there is no universal identifier for the genus. I wonder if there’s a need for a Web service to solve this. Given an ISBN (for, say, a mass market paperback), it would map from species to genus, collect all species in the genus, and return a lists of ISBNS (paperback, hardcover, audiocassette, etc.)

I have a feeling that implementing a service like this wouldn’t be too hard to implement using Amazon’s or Google’s web service APIs (or by Amazon themselves) and then send that back a list of ISBNs (via XML-RPC, SOAP, REST, etc) so that your javascript bookmarklet can look them up in turn.  This solution does have a problem, though.  If implemented on a single box somewhere, you’ve got a single point of failure.  It doesn’t just work, it’s not decentralized.  In order for this to work properly, you might have to employ some Javascript web services calls and employ some of localhost web services.

I get a little fuzzy on details at this point, mostly because I don’t have a whole lot of experience in Javascript, but I’m sure that a javascript client could take advantage of Amazon’s XML over HTTP, or you could use a Javascript SOAP implementation.  Once you’ve got that going, a few calls to Amazon to get a list of ISBNs and you can proceed on your way.  Of course you could always make your calls, parse some data, and create a result page on the fly containing amazon and barnes and noble results, info and status from your local libraries, and related information from Google.

Think of it as a on-the-fly search result dashboard.  Now extend that to include more than just books.  I’ll try to implement this when I get a chance, but I know there’s someone out there that could whip this up in 10 minutes, so feel free to do so if you get bored.

In conclusion, it’d be nice if Amazon implemented a web service like Jon spoke about, but they don’t neccesarily have to.  We might be able to do pretty well on our own (with the help of their web services, of course).