Re: web services -- WEB400

Hi Walden,

Option 3 sounds like a higher level of option 2, kind of like assembler vs
HLL.  It's still proprietary in that I can't use that interface to find out
what Wal Mart's item descriptions are -- it's specific to your company.  The
underlying details of the interface are hidden, making it easier to use;
definitely a good thing.

When you say the interface is published, how is that done?  Do you simply
send instructions on how to use it to people or companies you will allow to
use it?  Or does it have to be published on a server somewhere on the web?
Or simply posted on a web page?

When I read about this, I'm not sure which magazine, it mentioned that some
companies may actually charge for these types of service.  In your example,
there doesn't appear to be any built-in mechanism for doing that.  Do you
know of one?  When I read the article, it sounded like one more move in the
direction of providing services instead of software, in order to have a
steady revenue stream.  Nonetheless, it could be a very useful technology.

Curious,
Peter Dow
Dow Software Services, Inc.
909 425-0194 voice
909 425-0196 fax

----- Original Message -----
From: "Walden H. Leverich" <WaldenL@TechSoftInc.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2002 11:19 AM
Subject: RE: [WEB400] 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 into their system, of course this would be out of date.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-----



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