Google, Amazon, and Beyond

honestpuck writes "As titles go "Google, Amazon, and Beyond" sounds to me like Buzz Lightyear's latest slogan, but it's actually quite a good book about writing software to consume and provide web services." Read on for honestpuck's review of the book -- it sounds useful for developers on both sides of a web-service transaction, but honestpuck cautions that its value varies with your attachment to Java. Google, Amazon, and Beyond author Alexander Nakhimovsky and Tom Myers pages 314 publisher Apress rating 6 for most, 8 for Java programmers reviewer Tony Williams ISBN 1590591313 summary Good guide to web services for Java programmers

The first two chapters are introductory material, though the authors quickly introduce some code with JavaScript routines to talk to both Google and Amazon. The second of them does a good job explaining the intricacies of DOM and how you use it to build a web page in Java. Then the authors get down to some serious work at using Java, including stand-alone applications and applets, to access web services.

They move fast throughout the book; this is not one to read quickly or without ready access to a computer. That said, the writing is good; the text is understandable and all the code is well explained.

The book covers a wide gamut of techniques and technologies, including SOAP and REST on the query side, and XSLT and XPath on the output side.

Then the book moves on to instructions for offering your own services. This part of the book starts off with WebDAV using Tomcat, though there is a short digression into Java Server Pages before really getting down to the nitty gritty. Finally the book shows how to use WSDL and Axis to easily create full web applications.

You can see that this volume covers a lot of territory. This breadth may well be the book's largest flaw; its wide reach means no topic gets a really deep coverage and a number of topics do not get the coverage they deserve. Indeed I would have to say that only a much better Java programmer than I would get full value from this volume -- there were parts where the authors lost me entirely and it took an effort to get back my understanding, occasionally resorting to a Java manual.

The publishers have a page for the book that has an example chapter, table of contents, index and source code. The example chapter, 4, details how to build a SOAP server using Java and provides an excellent example for the book. If you're a little unsure of your Java skills, take a look at this chapter and see if you can easily understand the code and explanation. If you can, then this volume should have no surprises for you.

It should be said that nothing about the book's cover tells you how much of it relies on Java, though a good read of the table of contents makes it obvious. I would have personally preferred a book that was more general in the programming language it used, covering more of the tactics and methods rather than examining specific code. If, on the other hand, you are an experienced Java programmer looking for a book on programming web services in that language, then this is an excellent volume.

You can purchase Google, Amazon, and Beyond from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

I always shop at bookpool.com

[Anonymous Coward]

www.bookpool.com is much cheaper. O'Reilly books are usually 40% cheaper.

Re:web services

[justMichael]

Here is some elaboration... ;)

MOD PARENT DOWN - STOLEN TEXT!

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

Get it here: link!

Re:An application I'd like to have

[justMichael]

Google Rankins will do it for you, of course it only shows the top 1000. But that a limit set by google in the API agreement.

How can Sun push web services?

[Curt Cox]

I'm a big fan of both Sun and Java, but it dismays me that they continue to push web services and try to make better tools and APIs for web services without making their sites accessible to web services. Why oh, why, can't they at least provide a nice web service for Bug Parade.

Re:web services

[_Sharp'r_]

The biggest problem (probably not mentioned in the book) with Amazon's web services is that they can't seem to be consistent about keeping it up and running reliably. Some days 80% of queries to amazon's xslt and soap services don't work.

Why a B&N link?

[Anonymous Coward]

this book is $12 cheaper on amazon...

Re:web services

[dealsites]

Sorry to reply to my own comment....

Although this book is probably good, I found a lot of good PHP Amazon Web Services code from: http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Using-Amazon-Web-Se rvices-With-PHP-And-SOAP-part-1/.

I think they have other examples in languages other than PHP too.

Re:Too simplistic?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Apache SOAP. Your sample would then be something like

import java.util.Vector;
import org.apache.soap.Fault;

Vector theDetails = new Vector();
Fault theFault = new Fault();

theDetails.addElement (ex.toString());
theFault.setFaultCode ("42");
theFault.setFaultString ("internal error");
theFault.setDetailEntries (theDetails);

Re:Too simplistic?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you're entirely right. The is building an XML document as a string, which is very easy to get wrong. In this case, consider if ex contained a single ampersand character, and how that would break it. It's very easy to build invalid XML when generating it this way.

The only particular reason why you might want to build it as a string is if there are speed concerns, but you atleast need checks in place to ensure valid XML.

And yes, there are SOAP generators for Java, which mostly allow you to do intellisense-like coding in Eclipse.