RE: web services

Web services are to computers what web pages are to humans. A web service
allows me to offer a function over the web to a consumer where that consumer
is a program, not a human.

Web services allow me to publish (publicly or privately) a URL and an
interface definition and have that function consumed over the internet. The
interface is defined in a standard called SOAP or Standard Object Access
Protocol. The nice thing is that by using a toolkit like MS's SOAP toolkit
or the Apache version you can use the functions w/o worrying about all the
details of calling them on a remote machine.

Let's say I was a book publisher and Amazon wanted the ability to get
availability from me for a book so they could show that information to a
shopper on their site. Historically we could either:

1) Send them some type of periodic interface file (FTP, e-mail, tape,
whatever) with all my books and their availability which they would load
into their system, of course this would be out of date.
-Or-
2) My IT department and Amazon could craft some soft of custom proprietary
interface from their system to mine. Think about things like UPS and FedEx's
shipping software for examples. But when bn.com wanted the same thing I'd
have to craft another interface.

With Web Services I have option 3, Define and publish a GetAvail function
that takes the ISBN and returns availability.

Here is some VBScript that I used to test such a setup where I could get
back the item description for an item number. The description was retrieved
by calling an RPG program on my AS/400 that used AS/400 tables for the data.


-----sample code-----
Option Explicit

Dim soapClient, ItemNo

ItemNo = InputBox("Item Number"+chr(10)+"(Items 1-10 are valid)", "Lookup
Item Desc")

set soapclient = CreateObject("MSSOAP.SoapClient")
On Error Resume Next
Call
soapclient.mssoapinit("http://site.removed.to.protect.innocent.com/soap/Item
.wsdl",  "Item", "ItemSoapPort")
if err <> 0 then
  wscript.echo "initialization failed " + err.description
else

wscript.echo  soapclient.GetDescription(ItemNo)

if err <> 0 then
  wscript.echo   err.description
  wscript.echo   "faultcode=" + soapclient.faultcode
  wscript.echo   "faultstring=" + soapclient.faultstring
  wscript.echo   "faultactor=" + soapclient.faultactor
  wscript.echo   "detail=" + soapclient.detail
end if
end if
-----End sample-----

-Walden

------------
Walden H Leverich III
President
Tech Software
(516)627-3800 x11
WaldenL@TechSoftInc.com
http://www.TechSoftInc.com



-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Franz [mailto:franz400@triad.rr.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2002 11:37
To: web400@midrange.com
Subject: [WEB400] web services


Can someone define webservices?
Insider Weekly, quoting IBM's  Quarentello, says only about
100 iSeries sites using web services.
The article also makes the statement (not sure from who)
that most iSeries sites are static web pages.
My experience says that is not true, and there are many
iSeries way beyond static pages.
jim franz


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