Google, Amazon and Beyond: Creating and Consuming Web Services

Marc Notes: Dist. to the book trade by Springer-Verlag; Includes index. Table of Contents: A table of contents is not available for this title. Biographical Note: Alexander Nakhimovsky received a master's degree in mathematics from Leningrad University in St. Petersburg and a Ph. D. in linguistics from Cornell University, with a graduate minor in computer science. He has been teaching computer science at Colgate University since 1985. He is the author (jointly with Tom Myers) of several books and book chapters, including JavaScript Objects, Professional Java XML Programming, and Professional Java Server Programming, J2EE Edition, as well as books and articles on linguistics and artificial intelligence."Description for Sales People: While many books are focused on the underlying technologies of Web Services and others are dedicated to providing Web Services, few books show how to consume Web Services. This new book, "Consuming Web Services: The APIs from Google, Amazon, and Beyond," provides a thorough review of the technologies and techniques for connecting client applications to services of all kinds. Using a decidedly hands-on approach, the authors show extensive examples of programming with XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI in a variety of programming languages. Technology Involved: Java, Perl, XML, XSLT, WSDL, SOAP, XML-RPC, UDDI, JavaScript, . NET, JSP, RSSReview Quotes: From the reviews: "In contrast to a great many other books on web services, this book is structured firmly around what is out there and what works. A number of extended examples are used in the book . This extended example brings together many of the topics that are covered separately. the book also provides much useful additional, but essential, material. Overall then, this is a useful book . the reader can very quickly get up to speed and start experimenting." (TechBook Report online, March, 2004) "Publisher Marketing: What Is This Book About? This is a book about Web Services. Web Services are still more like a movement than a mature technology. The movement is motivated by a vision of a semi-auto mated Web that can support long chains of interactions between autonomous agents. There are three important components to that vision. One is interoperabil ity: a service can have clients (agents) from any platform, in any language. Another is autonomy: an agent can discover the services it needs from their published descriptions that include both what the service can do and how it does it (the interfaces of available actions). The third is (semi) automatic code creation: one description can be used by a development framework to automate the creation of code for clients and by the services themselves. As of today, interoperability is close to full realization, with only occasional glitches; autonomy is a distant vision; but it still has problems. Interoperability has been achieved code creation is useful in part by using an XML-based high-level protocol (SOAP) for message exchanges between clients and services. As long as the client can produce messages in the right format, it doesn't matter what language they're written in or on what platform they run. The first three chapters of our book show how to write platform-independent Web Services clients in Javascript and Java running from within a browser (IE6 or Mozilla)."

Contributor Bio:  Nakhimovsky, Alexander Alexander Nakhimovsky received a master's degree in mathematics from Leningrad University in St. Petersburg and a Ph. D. in linguistics from Cornell University, with a graduate minor in computer science. He has been teaching computer science at Colgate University since 1985. He is the author (jointly with Tom Myers) of several books and book chapters, including "JavaScript Objects", "Professional Java XML Programming", and "Professional Java Server Programming, J2EE Edition", as well as books and articles on linguistics and artificial intelligence. Contributor Bio:  Myers, Tom Tom Myers studied physics in Bogota and Buenos Aires before receiving his bachelor's degree from St. John's College, Santa Fe, and a Ph. D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania. A software developer and consultant, he has been working mostly on Java/XML projects for the past few years; some earlier research in parallelism and in functional programming languages seems to be coming back to life, within XSLT. In addition to joint publications with Alexander Nakhimovsky, he is the author of a book and several articles on theoretical computer science.