For me, the value of Atom haven't really clicked with me yet.  Its just too SOAPy for me.  If you look at ATOM, the ATOM protocol, and how people are talking about using it, they're really using it as an envelope.  One of the things that attracted me to REST was that I could focus on the problem at hand and ignore bulky middleware protocols (like SOAP) and lean on HTTP as a rich application protocol.

For example, if you want to get a list of messaging, why not just multipart/mixed?  Its a very simple format.  Its easy to parse.  You can assign specify headers to each body and use well-known headers like Content-Location if you want to replace actual content with a link. Its all much more compact.  Better yet, why not just send back a comma-delimited list of URLs.

Maybe I just haven't seen the light yet.  It took me months to accept REST as a viable way of doing things.  Maybe I just need somebody to yell at me about ATOM.

Those drivers have the potential to usher in a new generation of marketing technology, especially geared towards optimizing the communication and coordination between agencies and in-house teams.

Rubel talks about using wikis, internal blogs, and microblogs — which I agree are a great start — to tackle the "huge inefficiencies in the way agencies manage workflow internally and also how they collaborate with clients."

However, I also think there will be a wave of new marketing-specific applications — primarily offered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) — that help address challenges with implementing and managing:

• Long Tail strategies in search marketing and online advertising;
• social media marketing at scale across a plethora of microchannels;
• closed-loop (or semi-closed-loop) tracking of marketing ROI;

Continues @ Cheifmartec.com

When we talk about web service we are referring to a technology stack that include HTTP and SOAP among others. A web service is a software component that can be accessed by sending SOAP messages following the rules defined in the corresponding WSDL document. For those that are not familiar with this terms here is a short glossary with some common terminology in the world of Web services:

• SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol, it specifies how to create the messages, its parts, how each part should be used.
• WSDL: Web Service Definition Language, it is just a XML document that describes how to interact with an specific web service. Every Web Service must have an associated WSDL. The only thing needed to consume a web service is its WSDL.
• HTTP: Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, it is the main transport protocol of Internet.
• UDDI: Universal Description, Discovery and Integration, defines how to maintain a structure of directories to share information about web services.

• What do we mean when we say "Web Services"?
• What do we use Web Services for?
• Please don´t use DataSets in your Web Services
• Tools for Web Services developers

Well, this all for now and walcomen to this series, I hope you to enjoy it.

.asmx

View All Questions In WebServices

Web service is a application, which exposes the data and functionality in the distributed environment. Web service is highly interoperable and accessible from any platform. Web services are XML based. Distributed applications access them over the internet through a communication protocol named SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)

View All Questions In WebServices

• Web Services.
• Dot Net Remoting.
• Dot Net Enterprise Services

View All Questions In WebServices

With all the Vistual studio pre-generated project artifacts and templates it's so much easier to get your[WebMethod] and voila! WSDL is genareted and contract is ready.

Here is nice article to address the doubts "Contract-First Web Services: 6 Reasons to Start with WSDL and Schema" on SOA Magazine

After doing some research and blogs scanning WSCF tool from thinktecture looks promising.
To get running WSCF 0.7 in Visual Studio 2008 look at this post:
http://blogs.thinktecture.com/cweyer/archive/2007/12/07/415049.aspx

(For the default .AddIn file locations for Visual Studio add-ins http://www.mztools.com/articles/2008/MZ2008001.aspx )

Nice post on the WebServiceContractFirst topic
http://www.dotneteer.com/Weblog/post/2008/04/WSDL-first-(Contract-first)-Web-Service-development-with-Visual-Studio-2008.aspx

30-Sep-2008- Submitted by: Kas Thomas, Analyst

Not long ago I blogged about the newly announced Content Management Interoperability Services specification, which is a joint effort of EMC, IBM, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, Alfresco, and Microsoft. If you close your eyes and sniff, CMIS smells a bit like JCR minus the coffee aroma. It's a high-level spec aimed at making content repositories reachable via platform-neutral (RESTful and SOAP-based) protocols.

As such, CMIS opens the way (in theory, at least) to faster development, easier integrations between the ECM and enterprise-middleware worlds, less dependence on proprietary SDKs (thus less vendor lock-in), and so on.

At first glance, CMIS seems too good to be true. Certainly it seems well motivated (as was JSR 170, which failed to set the world on fire), and it has drawn considerable attention based on its use of technologies like Atom Publishing Protocol and REST.

But there are those who think it's all a bit strange... including Roy T. Fielding, the father of REST.

Fielding said in his blog yesterday: "I am getting tired of big companies making idiotic claims about REST and their so-called RESTful architectures. The only similarity between CMIS and REST is that they both have four-letter acronyms."

Continues at CMSWatch

Download DigiLeen hier:

Over DigiLeen valt veel te zeggen. Je leest heel wat op de VCOB-website (voor de professional) of Muziekweb (voor de eindgebruiker). Hier focussen we op drie dingen:

Auteursrechtelijk beveiligd. Digital Rights Management (DRM) wordt door een eindgebruiker als restrictief ervaren. DigiLeen is een van de weinige toepassingen waar DRM net kansen biedt. De keuze voor een standaard alom gebruikte DRM is vrij beperkt en leidt onherroepelijk naar Microsoft. Apple geeft geen licenties vrij voor zijn DRM Fairplay en open source (contradictio in terminis met DRM) initiatieven zijn vrij zeldzaam. DigiLeen DRM is niet te kraken (alle un-DRM's ten spijt) en enkel mits veel kwaliteitsverlies analoog op te nemen met sommige audiorecorders.

Dat brengt ons bij gratis. De kosten voor DigiLeen worden voor de Vlaamse overheid betaalbaar gehouden door de goedwil van  platenlabels en auteursrechtenmaatschappijen die brood zien in het 'try before you buy' principe van DigiLeen. Tegelijk geven zij bibliotheken en eindgebruikers de mogelijkheid om te gidsen en te grasduinen in een groot en kwalitatief aanbod van klassieke muziek, wereldmuziek en jazz.

Lokale bibliotheken worden aangespoord DigiLeen zoveel mogelijk te promoten en te integreren in hun aanbod. Hoewel DigiLeengebruikers geen lid moeten zijn van een bibliotheek, doen we er alles aan om de bibliotheek als uitgangspunt van DigiLeen te nemen. Op Zoeken.bibliotheek.be hebben we DigiLeen naadloos geïntegreerd (met de verfijningen van Aquabrowser wordt DigiLeen opeens een hele andere belevenis!) en we bieden wekelijkse exports en webservices aan aan de lokale bibs om hetzelfde te doen in hun catalogus. Daarin gaan we alvast een stap verder dan in Nederland.

Het oorspronkelijke plan was om DigiLeen officieel te lanceren op 16 oktober. De pers besliste er vandaag door stom toeval anders over. Op 16 oktober volgt nog een infomoment met de lancering van een nieuw (Vlaams) label in DigiLeen. Geniet ondertussen alvast van de andere muziek ...

Pers:

VTM-nieuws 19u:
http://www.vtm.be/asx/vtmnieuws/index_opgeknipt.php?
20080930_194359_3G_MUZIEKBIB.mxf

4FM, QMusic, Radio Nostalgie

StuBru Volt:
http://internetradio.vrt.be/radiospeler/v2_prod/wmp.html?qsbrand=41&qsODfile=/internetradio_master/productiesysteem2/
programma_od/41_od_080930_bib.xml)

Donna Stereo Spécial:
http://internetradio.vrt.be/radiospeler/
v2_prod/wmp.html?qsbrand=51 (klik op net gemist en Stereo Spécial en schuif naar 30:00)

Radio 2 Middagpost:
http://internetradio.vrt.be/popups/radio2/radioplayer.html?qsbrand=22&
qsODfile=/internetradio_master/productiesysteem2/
programma_od/21_22mp30110.xml)

Posted by justin on Sep 29, 2008 in Marketing Strategy, Mobile Search

With so much speculation surrounding the main reasoning behind the Android platform and its intentions, I think it should be obviously clear.  While some argue its Google’s attempt to tread into the enterprise, and maybe some day it will, its main intention is to dominate the mobile-based advertising market like it did on the desktop.

The Android platform, while being open source and available to any carrier and handset maker, will always have numerous entrance points to Google by way of Google search, Google Apps, GMail, GTalk, etc.  Each entrance point to Google services is yet another opportunity for relevant advertising- the kind Google does so well.

With the future onslaught of developers vying to build the latest and greatest apps for Android, the usage of the platform will increase, as well opportunities for Google to advertise.  Beyond Google, any smart company or brand can use the platform, much like the iPhone, to promote their image using various apps, websites, etc.

Continues @ http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com

Here is an interesting article, "How to Share Session State Between Classic ASP and ASP.NET"

May be important when we start consuming the web service.

• Yahoo: http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/rest/V1/geocode.html
• Yahoo (without app-id): http://www.batchgeocode.com/lookup/
• Lookup for ZIP/Place only, but many more free services: http://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html

Anyway, still needed to call the WS from Java, but thanks to google I found a solution quickly (http://xml.nig.ac.jp/tutorial/rest/index.html) and expanded it to my usecase:

[sourcecode language='java']
    private static String buildWebQuery(Map parameters) throws Exception {
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        for (Map.Entry entry : parameters.entrySet()) {
            String key = URLEncoder.encode(entry.getKey(), "UTF-8");
            String value = URLEncoder.encode(entry.getValue(), "UTF-8");
            sb.append(key).append("=").append(value).append("&");
        }
        return sb.toString().substring(0, sb.length() - 1);
    }

    public static String callRestfulWebService(String address, Map parameters) throws Exception {
        return callRestfulWebService(address, parameters, null, 0);
    }

    public static String callRestfulWebService(String address, Map parameters, String proxy, String port) throws Exception {
        return callRestfulWebService(address, parameters, proxy, Integer.parseInt(port));
    }

    public static String callRestfulWebService(String address, Map parameters, String proxy, int port) throws Exception {

        Proxy proxyObject = null;
        if (StringUtils.isNotBlank(proxy) && port > 0) {
            InetSocketAddress proxyAddress = new InetSocketAddress(proxy, port);
            proxyObject = new Proxy(Proxy.Type.HTTP, proxyAddress);
        }

        String response = "";
        String query = buildWebQuery(parameters);

        // More info: http://xml.nig.ac.jp/tutorial/rest/index.html
        URL url = new URL(address);

        // make post mode connection
        URLConnection urlc = null;
        if (proxyObject == null) {
            urlc = url.openConnection();
        } else {
            urlc = url.openConnection(proxyObject);
        }
        urlc.setDoOutput(true);
        urlc.setAllowUserInteraction(false);

        // send query
        PrintStream ps = new PrintStream(urlc.getOutputStream());
        ps.print(query);
        ps.close();

        // retrieve result
        BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(urlc.getInputStream(), "UTF-8"));
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        String line;
        while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {
            sb.append(line);
            sb.append("\n");
        }
        br.close();
        response = sb.toString();

        return response;
    }
[/sourcecode]

With these few methods you can call any REST WebService with any parameters (as Map) and use a proxy per call. The code also takes care of right encoding of parameters. The result is a xml string, which can be processed by regexp in an easy way.

Greetz, GHad

Copyright (c) 2008 by Waiming Mok

• Introduction to REST
• Putting Java to REST

Also, today I put out RESTEasy 1.0 Beta 8.  I small tiny bug was found by the community which I rolled up quick into a release.  Follow the downloads link at http://jboss.org/resteasy to check it out.

• So how do I like FriendFeed? You can see me on FriendFeed here. I now have a whopping 4 friends in friendfeed, two of whom I know in real life, two of whom I do not know. Granted, I have not actively tried to find my friends' feeds and get them to use FriendFeed.
• I also only set up a few of my own personal feeds into the tool. I think FriendFeed supports the aggregation of activity from 43 tools now. I've only allowed it to aggregate from 3 of mine: Amazon WishList, StumbleUpon, and Twitter.
• Do you really want to know the obscure Sundance award-winning film in my Netflix queue? I don't think so. Or even if that was of interest (which is a scary thought), would you have time to review the minutia in my feed? I tend to want to keep the FriendFeed feed to more of a minimum - less is more.
• Have I added enough value to make it worthwhile? Perhaps the best way to use FriendFeed is ensure that your selectivity filter is on, i.e. You don't want to seek out all your Twitter followings, Facebook etc. and start following each person or provide every nuanced move of your entire social life in your own feed to the friends who are devoted enough to follow you.
• I really do like the UI - it's simple, clean, and I haven't yet said "wait, how do I do that?"
• For me, I definitely see more utility in this tool to a certain extent. I want to follow knowledgeable people who post topics that can inform me about work topics, social networking, and the like.
• Today it comes back to this question: How Many Web Services Can One Person Use? I am saturated. FriendFeed is one of many tools I use, but with so many tools, it seems to take more effort to absorb each new one. Selectivity is king.

Conclusion: I should selectively seek out some more appropriate feeds to follow (i.e. feeds which share my non-overload philosophy) and share my FriendFeed and see what happens?  I may try to make FriendFeed a little more sticky for my daily life. Is the tool still useful? I'll do all of this, that is when I get time to seek out more feeds!

Instead of its original purpose, Joshua Schachter is instead using Mechanical Turk as a platform to conduct behavioral economic experiments, paying only a fraction of what such experiments usually cost and waiting only hours instead of weeks to get results back.

He only uses the system to reveal utility functions, but I'm sure it could be coaxed into conducting much more interesting experiments. And all without the biases that you get from using economics and business students who have usually been drilled in game theory before they take part in these experiments and tend to act more selfish than members of the general population.

What a neat way to combine a physical key, server based computing, and web services.

The company, Yubico, that invented it is based in Stockholm.

Copyright (c) 2008 by Waiming Mo

http://jboss.org/resteasy

to download and browse docs.  Have fun.

The way to add a web reference to your web service is to first figure out where the web service resides.  It can be a full web address or it can be a local folder.  Once you figure that out you need to create a reference to it. To do this:

Right click on the project and select add web reference. When you do this you are presented with a box - Add Web Reference. From here you will choose the correct link under Browse to: and select the web service you will use.  I chose local machine since I am working within an Intranet.  The service URL shows up. I just have to click it and the URL at the top auto fills with the URL of the web service. Then you choose add reference under the right window to add the reference to your application.  Visual Studio will ask you if you want to put it in its own folder or not. I like to keep my things separate so I choose to keep them separate. 

Once you do that, all you have to do is add one of code to start using it in your application:

Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load

Dim wcConvert As New foldername.Servicename()

When you create the web service it will be in a folder called App_WebReferences. Under that will be the folder name mentioned above. Under the folder is the service file. So you want to reference it by foldername.servicename().  That is it! You can start using it now.

What I did was convert it to a DataView so I could extract the data out of the dataset I needed. In order to do this, it woul dbe best to convert the dataset (web service) to a dataview. You have more options with a dataview.  I found out through trial and error that you cannot set up a dataview as a web service.  It is not a recognized XML format apparently.  So to convert you need to add this to your code:

Imports System.Data

Imports System.Data.DataView

Dim dv As New DataView

dv = wcConvert.functionname().Tables(0).DefaultView

With the dataview you can now sort (dv.sort) and select distinct values DDLcontrolname.DataSource = dv.ToTable(True, "columnName").

With all the above in place you can now use the DataSource to bind to a control.

DDLcontrolname.DataTextField = "Name"

DDLcontrolname.DataValueField = "Name"

DDLcontrolname.DataBind() 

That is all there is to it. Now I have to figure out how to implament caching so not to hit the web service every page refresh. Until next time, always remember, with great power comes great responsibility.

/*
 * To change this template, choose Tools | Templates
 * and open the template in the editor.
 */
package com;

import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
/**
 *
 * @author Ashwin
 */
public class PostXml {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        try {
            String xmldata = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?><soapenv:Envelope xsi:schemaLocation=\"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/ http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/\" xmlns:xsi = \"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance\" xmlns:xsd = \"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema\" xmlns:soapenv = \"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/\" xmlns:tab = \"http://j2ee.netbeans.org/xsd/tableSchema\" > <soapenv:Body><tab:PURCHASE_ORDER> <tab:PURCHASE_ORDER_Record><tab:CUSTOMER_ID>1</tab:CUSTOMER_ID><tab:ORDER_NUM>14</tab:ORDER_NUM><tab:QUANTITY>1</tab:QUANTITY><tab:SHIPPING_DATE>2006-07-28</tab:SHIPPING_DATE><tab:FREIGHT_COMPANY>PRimeSOft</tab:FREIGHT_COMPANY><tab:SALES_DATE>2006-07-26</tab:SALES_DATE><tab:SHIPPING_COST>901</tab:SHIPPING_COST><tab:PRODUCT_ID>980001</tab:PRODUCT_ID></tab:PURCHASE_ORDER_Record></tab:PURCHASE_ORDER></soapenv:Body></soapenv:Envelope>";

            //http://localhost:11080/PlaceOrderService/PlaceOrderPort
            //Create socket
            String hostname = "localhost";
            int port = 11080;
            InetAddress addr = InetAddress.getByName(hostname);
            Socket sock = new Socket(addr, port);

            //Send header
            String path = "/PlaceOrderService/PlaceOrderPort";
            BufferedWriter wr = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(sock.getOutputStream(), "UTF-8"));
            // You can use "UTF8" for compatibility with the Microsoft virtual machine.
            wr.write("POST " + path + " HTTP/1.0\r\n");
            wr.write("Host: localhost\r\n");
            wr.write("Content-Length: " + xmldata.length() + "\r\n");
            wr.write("Content-Type: text/xml; charset=\"utf-8\"\r\n");
            wr.write("\r\n");

            //Send data
            wr.write(xmldata);
            wr.flush();

            // Response
            BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(sock.getInputStream()));
            String line;
            while ((line = rd.readLine()) != null) {
                System.out.println("Response :"+line);
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

:- More to Continue On Webservices

The first thing that needs to be done is create a web site and choose ASP.NET Web Service from the Template window.  If you are thinking about using the web service as it is intended for, reusability, then you will want to place it in a directory folder that will be accessible to all application that can use it on the intranet (although you can reference a web service by using a web address, we will not go into that). An example of a folder would be ‘WebServices’. This folder would hold all web service created. We will name this web service ‘getAllStationInfo’.

Once you have your web site started you will see that the default page opens up and is ready for coding.  It has already imported the namespaces needed at the top and has a public class named Service.  We will be adding more namespaces to ours because of the nature of the service – database query.  It will look like the below:

Imports System.Web

Imports System.Web.Services

Imports System.Web.Services.Protocols

Imports System.Data.SqlClient

Imports System.Data

It also has its first function called HelloWorld() for editing. All we are going to do this time is create a web method that can be consumed. Here is what it looks like at first:

<WebMethod()> _

    Public Function HelloWorld() As String

        Return "Hello World"

    End Function

This is what a finished one looks like:

<WebMethod()> _ 

    Public Function getAllStationInfo() As DataSet

        Dim conn As New SqlConnection(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings("DatabaseNameHere").ConnectionString)

        conn.Open()

        Dim adapter As New SqlDataAdapter("Select statement", conn)

        Dim ds As New DataSet()

        adapter.Fill(ds, "name of function here")

        conn.Close()

        Return ds

    End Function

You will notice that the SqlConnection is referencing a named connection string:

Dim conn As New SqlConnection(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings("DatabaseNameHere").ConnectionString)

This is referencing code from the web.config file.  The connection string there looks like so:

……<configuration>

            <appSettings/>

            <connectionStrings>

                        <add name="databaseName" connectionString="server=Servername'; Database=databaseName; uid=; pwd=;" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/>

            </connectionStrings>

            <system.web>……

Now to get back to the web service. You will notice that right before the function there is a line: <WebMethod()> _

This attribute enables the web service method to communicate with we appications located at local or remote locations.

Something I failed to mention previously is that there is a web service attribute that can be set. The syntax is like so:

<WebService(Namespace:="http://servername")> _

This will provide additional information about the webservices, such as information about the functionality of the web service itself.

All we are doing in this web service is creating a dataset to be consumed by anyone who wants to use it.

To test the web service, all you have to do is right click on the service.asmx file and view in browser. If it works you will see the function name that you can click and then the next page allows you to invoke the function. The reuslt of clicking on invoke is a new page filled with XML data. If you see this, you have accomplished creatign a web service.  You can create a web service to do anything you want it to do.  Just keep in mind that the key is reusablity.

In the next post, we will look at how to actually consume a web service in an appication and how to display the results of a web service.

• Ryan McDonnough, for his hard work on writing the JAXB+XML,  JAXB+JSON, and Multipart providers.
• Olivier Brand, for his Spring/Hibernate/RESTEasy example application
• Martin Algesten, for all his bug fixing, patching, and the YAML provider

One final thing,  The main project page has moved off of JBoss WIKI to jboss.org:

http://jboss.org/resteasy

Have fun. The next release will be focusing on innovations, specifically:  Asynchronous JAX-RS, JAX-RS Messaging, Asynchronous HTTP, and HTTP Caching.