The core idea behind Real World Web Services is simple: after years of hype, what are the major players really doing with web services? Standard bodies may wrangle and platform vendors may preach, but at the end of the day what are the technologies that are actually in use, and how can developers incorporate them into their own applications? Those are the answers Real World Web Services delivers. It's a field guide to the wild and wooly world of non-trivial deployed web services. The heart of the book is a series of projects, demonstrating the use and integration of Google, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, FedEx, and many more web services. Some of these vendors have been extremely successful with their web service deployments: for example, eBay processes over a billion web service requests a month! The author focuses on building 8 fully worked out example web applications that incorporate the best web services available today. The book thoroughly documents how to add functionality like automating listings for auctions, dynamically calculating shipping fees, automatically sending faxes to your suppliers, using an aggregator to pull data from multiple news and web service feeds into a single format or monitoring the latest weblog discussions and Google searches to keep web site visitors on top of topics of interest-by integrating APIs from popular websites most people are already familiar with. For each example application, the author provides a thorough overview, architecture, and full working code examples. This book doesn't engage in an intellectual debate as to the correctness of web services on a theological level. Instead, it focuses on the practical, real world usage of web services as the latest evolution in distributed computing, allowing for structured communication via Internet protocols. As you ll see, this includes everything from sending HTTP GET commands to retrieving an XML document through the use of SOAP and various vendor SDKs.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 10 Ratings

not what I was hoping for - 2005-01-30
Reviewer Rating:

I was very disappointed with this book. I was hoping for something that would go into detail of the various Web Services solutions offered by Amazon, Google, etc. Instead it is just another Java book filled with mostly code (is it a sin to use prose anymore?) and lacking in any kind of detailed discussion at all. It basically talks about very specific problems, offers some code, then moves on to another specific solution. I found it completely uninteresting.

The only person I would suggest this book for is someone who wants code to Cut and Paste without really understanding what they are doing. And good luck to them ;-)

Great bridge from theory to practical... - 2005-02-14
Reviewer Rating:
Since Domino 7 will start to incorporate web services more readily into application development, I figured it was time to start getting a little more versed on the subject. To that end, I got a copy of Real World Web Services by Will Iverson (O'Reilly). Coupled with a detailed tutorial/reference manual, this is a really good selection.

Chapter List: Web Service Evolution; Foundations of Web Services; Development Platform; Project 1: Competitive Analysis; Project 2: Auctions and Shipping; Project 3: Billing and Faxing; Project 4: Syndicated Search; Project 5: News Aggregator; Project 6: Audio CD Catalog; Project 7: Hot News Sheet; Project 8: Automatic Daily Discussions; Future Web Service Directions; Index

While the book is smallish (206 pages), there's a lot of value packed in it. Iverson takes you from the beginning of simple HTTP request and responses, through data scrapping, into RPC technology, and then finally into web services. The overview really helps you to understand how we got to where we are. He explains how to set up a simple test development environment as well as what you'll need, and then it's directly into the example projects. Here's where the book shines. These projects connect to live data sources such as Amazon, Google, FedEx, and eBay, so you're not dealing with simple examples that don't translate to the real world. Each of the projects are applications that you could easily see yourself using on a daily basis, either exactly as written or with some moderate tweaking. And since you're learning the mechanics of connecting with that service, it's easy to extrapolate the information into the areas that might interest you more.

If you have no background in SOAP or WSDL, I'd recommend you get a foundational book that has a good tutorial and reference material. You won't get it from this book, nor should you expect to. It's not his intended purpose for the book. But this is the book that will help you go from theoretical to practical, and that's worth its weight in gold.

Very good book if you're looking to take the next step in your web services development...

Decent Book - 2006-03-16
Reviewer Rating:
Real World Web Services by Will Iverson is more of a "here's an example of something someone might want to do" type book. The book contains a lot of Java source code to connect to some web services from big names like eBay, Google, and FedEx. Whether these examples are useful or whether the reader can glean out other uses of the code depends on the skill the reader has in programming. The book also goes over some basic concepts and tools the reader can use to get started with web services. All in all, Real World Web Services will give you a taste of what web services are, yet leaves out the low level details of how it works.

On par, but nothing special... good for testing, though - 2007-05-24
Reviewer Rating:
While the samples are straight-forward, to the point and easy to follow, the book doesn't really provide enough under-the-cover view. Generally speaking, if you are looking for some insight into WS used with Google, eBay, FedEx, etc. this is a wonderful book.

If you are looking into information for things such as "using Axis for real-world WS", this just scratches the surface.

However...

This book provided a wonderful set of quick, easy test setups for use against generic WS implementations (such as those provided in B2Bi software) for comparative results. The peer into the provider-specific details made it wonderful to have provide expected output and check the diffs on files.

Recommended for QA, unit testing, automated testing, etc.
Recommended for those interested in quick samples but not in a core understanding of the technologies.

Very specific - 2007-04-22
Reviewer Rating:
I thought that this is a book very specific to certain aspects of web services and examples are overly detailed...I dont expect the book to be compiled mostly with elaborative examples.

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