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

web services

[Anonymouse Cownerd]

both google and amazon offer their data as web services. that is, amazon has made available their database data in XML format. this allows you to do cool things like junglescan.com. google offers a similiar service, but im not too familiar with it. anyone care to elaborate?

Re:An application I'd like to have

[elmegil]

Go read Spidering Hacks or Google Hacks by O'Reilly.

Xen and opensource

[mhamel]

Does anybody knows about Xen? It is a proposition for a programing language which use the document has a metaphor insteed of the object.

Is has many advantages and makes more then some sence from a webservices perpective. I would love to work on an opensource implementation of something like that. It could be based on python (for example). That would do a great mix with zope.

Anybody knows if something like that exists?

Re:Xen and opensource

[Repugnant_Shit]

Can you elaborate more on object vs document? I've always thought of my documents as objects when I code.

Re:Xen and opensource

[mhamel]

well here is a great paper about it: the article

it basically says that when you use an API to access things like a DOM Node, you lose things like type checking and other advantages inherent to OO programming. They then go on and ask: "why not put that API in the language syntaxe?" The paper is great on the advantages of it has some very good examples.

Too simplistic?

[VP]

Seems to me that this book is presented in a hobyist and simplistic manner. In the sample chapter we find this:

sB.append("<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>\n")
.append("<SOAP-ENV:Envelope \n")
...
.append(" <SOAP-ENV:Body>\n")
.append(" <SOAP-ENV:Fault>\n")
.append(" <SOAP-ENV:faultcode>")
.append(42)
.append("</SOAP-ENV:faultcode>\n")
.append(" <SOAP-ENV:faultstring>internal error</SOAP-ENV:faultstring>\n")
.append("<SOAP-ENV:detail>\n").append(ex.toString( ))
.append("</SOAP-ENV:detail>\n")
.append(" </SOAP-ENV:Fault>\n")
.append(" </SOAP-ENV:Body>\n")
.append("</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>\n");

This is how building the SOAP fault is shown, and I don't think it is right. I thought there are plenty of tools in the Java world that will provide you with better ways to handle this - am I mistaken?

"Wicked Cool Shell Scripts" slashdotted to top

[ddebrito]

When checking www.junglescan.com, it was interesting to see "Wicked Cool Shell Scripts: 101 Scripts for Linux, Mac OS X, and UNIX Systems " at the top of the "Today's top winners" with a +41331% change at Amazon. This book was reviewed yesterday in Slashdot.

How long before Web Services finally dies?

[Anonymous Coward]

Web services were so big 1-2 years ago... and nothing. Absolutely nothing substantial.

People are still clinging to this notion that Web Services is still the "Big Thing", but frankly it isn't. It's pretty mundane, and doesn't deserve the level of respect that it still seems to get.

Remember all the hullabaloo over how Web Services will change the way the Web will work? How UDDI will allow different vendors to create competing Web Services and customers could choose between them? It would be the next great competitive market? Such a great market never got created.

It's ova! Go home! It's going to go the way of the dodo soon. I predict that Amazon will soon get rid of it because it will become more of a pain in the ass to support than being something that generates actual revenues.