760Part IVConnectionsIntegration between businesses (Web server logs) particularly benefits the smaller
760Part IVConnectionsIntegration between businesses particularly benefits the smaller parties involved. Web servicesare easy to implement because corporate firewalls already have holes punched through themfor HTTP and SMTP and because they can be implemented by using inexpensive software suchas PHP. Say that you run a small business that makes widgets. You want your widgets dis- tributed by a large retailer, Humongous Widget Depot. Until recently, for you (and the gazillionsof other manufacturers who supply goods to Humongous Widget Depot) to provide real-timeinventory information to the retailer entailed tremendous expense as you bought a large soft- ware package such as SAP and integrated it on a private network. Now, in theory, each smallmanufacturer can merely expose its inventory information via a Web service, and HumongousWidget Depot s humongous IT department merely points a Web services client at them. That, in a nutshell, is the dream and the promise of Web services. We are quite a way from theactuality, but the outlines of a solution are firming up. REST, XML-RPC, SOAP, .NETFor Web services to work, every application and many servers need to speak a common lan- guage. Everyone agrees that the common language is XML, but there are some philosophicaldifferences about the implementation details. The three main Web services standards areREST, XML-RPC, and SOAP. One of the biggest backers of SOAP is Microsoft, which uses thatstandard heavily in its .NET services architecture. RESTRESTis an acronym for REpresentational State Transfer. The concept is based on a disserta- tion by Roy Fielding, and its main point is that we already have everything we need to imple- ment Web services in HTTP itself. So all REST services must be reachable by normal URIsusing the HTTP GETmethod, and they return XML without any special coded wrapping. Forall intents and purposes, a REST service is just an XML page on the Web, although usually notone that is intended to be read by a human being using a browser. Universal addressability is a big part of the REST style, so Web services that return data inresponse to an HTTP POSTare not technically REST-ful. eBay s developer program has main- tained a service like this for some time now, although by press time they may have switchedto a SOAP service. REST is particularly valuable for content-focused services. You can build an XML documenton the fly, and your users can access it reliably as a URI. In theory, REST should also be easierfor lightly technical users to deal with. On the other hand, REST doesn t have built-in supportfor complex types because there s no shared vocabulary, there s no particular way to desig- nate an array versus a string. You can learn more about REST at the RESTWiki: http://internet.conveyor.com/RESTwiki/moin.cgi/FrontPageand at the Web site of Paul Prescod, REST s most tireless promoter: www.prescod.netCaution46
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