I have created a new Gotze API PHP-client (source) is using PHP and NuSOAP to interface with GotzeLinked. Have a go at the client!
The client is inspired by a Google API client from DevShed’s Using The Google Web APIs With PHP.
Incidentally, the Google API yesterday celebrated its first birthday.
Loosely Coupled: The Missing Pieces of Web Services is the title of Doug Kaye’s new book. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
The link above uses Amazon.co.uk’s new web service. For good and worse, it shows loosely coupling in practice. Amazon needs to work on the data quality; many prices are missing in the web service, as well as many images. But kudos for establishing the web service.
I’ve spent some time over the weekend making a search client for my Gotze API. Get the source if you want to try my web service. You need SOAP::Lite. Our you can build your own client using my WSDL-file.
Any UDDI-hackers out there? I need someone to explain me what a tModel is. Please.
Jon Udell blogs from CTO Forum: Adam Bosworth paints the big picture, with some interesting thoughts. Not surprising (after all, Bosworth is CTO in BEA), a key component is imagined to be a message broker that sits in the middle of everything. In my view, that was an unnecessary sales plug, because that is exactly where the vendor takes over from the visionary, as I see it. I don’t see a broker (at least not a traditional such) as something central to service-oriented thinking. The idea of an XML repository, on the other hand, is not only central, but essential, but IMO a repository is not necessarily a broker.
Phil Windley picks up on another, and more interesting, point:
Thinking of data proactively and attempting to build data models independent of applications is difficult not just technically, but politically as well. I think we can make some progress toward independent data by adhering to some fairly simple priniciples about making data more usable outside an application. That doesn’t solve some of the thorniest problems however. Its time to break up the one-to-one relationships between applications and data. But the only way this will happen is if CIOs make it an issue, take a stand, and play a leadership role. CIOs by nature should have a longer term vision than the operational folks and this is a perfect example of where that principal ought to have an impact.
For those who haven’t seen Phil’s priniciples, read them. For those who’ve seen them before, revisit them.
Yesterday, Microsoft started offering RSS-feeds from MSDN. Today, Dave Winer notes that Cisco Systems has 12 new RSS feeds, among them Latest News Releases, Security, and Standards. Dave also points to Apple’s two feeds. IBM has had numerous RSS-feeds for a while. There is no consistency in the use of RSS-standards: Microsoft and Cisco uses RSS2.0, Apple RSS0.91 and IBM RSS1.0.
Jørgen Thelin has been posting about RSS standardisation recently, and has some good points. Jørgen also created an XML Schema for RSS 2.0. Good initiative. Maybe I should ask Jørgen to submit the schema to the Danish Infostructurebase?
BlogShares is a fantasy stock market for weblogs, where players get to invest a fictional $500, and blogs are valued by inbound links.
Gotzeblogged’s BlogShares are for some reason not up for sale. Is it because too few people link to my blog, while I link to all lot of people?
Preview: Search client. A basic SOAP-client to GotzeLinked. Using the new Gotze API.
Interface? Check the Gotze API WSDL-file. Comments requested.
Gartner Group has launched the Emerging Storm weblog, which provides information to help your organization prepare for potential disruptions during this time of global unrest. Gartner will assist you with what you need to know, and what you need to do, to handle critical business issues in a time of instability. Remember that Weblogs are conversations – so we welcome your input, views and comments.
So, Gartner jumps the bandwagon of analyst blogs.
Hmm. Where’s Gartner’s RSS-feed? (Jupiter has one …).
Micah Alpern‘s great Trusted Blog Searching tool is a truly wonderful tool. Like he says:
– Some times I want to know what the world thinks (google)
– Some times I want to know what I think (my weblog)
– Some times I want to know what those I respect think (blogs I read)
So, Micah the interaction designer thought, why not wrap up a one-stop shop for all my search needs? And why not release it with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, so that others can use it? And then he just went away and did it … Thanks Micah!
Tadaaa: Allow me to present the new Gotzesphere search!
var myweblog = “slashdemocracy.org”; var mygooglekey = “8VnwzO3OM3LdajzToxLLjRnicWi5AIHB”; var myopmlfile = “http://slashdemocracy.org/links/75.opml”;
The tool is using the Google Soap API with PHP to do a series of domain specific searches with the site:foo.com advanced operator. The list of sites to search are fetched from an OPML file. All the results are collected together and presented on a single page. Elementary. Genious.
I already provide OPML-feeds from my GotzeLinked. I produce my blogrolls from here.
Radio UserLand users can easyly create an OPML-feed. If you use blogrolling.com, you also have an OPML-feed.
You can add this service to your own site in several ways. You can download the source like I did, and run everything yourself. Or you can use my site as an intermediate. Feel free to do so, but please let me know, so I can inform you of any changes; if there is interest, I can wrap up a number of related services, such as connecting Newsisfree web services.
Like many others, I blogged the comments recently made by Don Box and Bob Sutor – Microsoft and IBM – about the maturity of web services and XML and the standards used.
There is however a whole lot more to web services than Box’s Holy Trinity (SOAP, WSDL and UDDI). As I see it, web services can only be called mature when we have open standards for the complete technology stack, and we’re sadly far away from such completion, it seems.
Yesterday, CNET reported that W3C seeks standards accord on the upper layers of the technology stack, here specifically concerning Web Services Choreography.
And yesterday, Microsoft and IBM themselves put forward two new proposals for new standards, WS-ReliableMessaging and WS-Addressing. As CNET reports there is a lot of politics involved here.
Also new this week is the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) standard, which OASIS announced.
So, where do we stand today? On a slippery surface, it seems to me. Not only are all the upper layers in the technology as mess, but I think we also have to be aware of the basic layers. Take SOAP, for example. How good is it actually? Doug Kaye points to the results of a benchmarking exercise about the performance of SOAP as compared to XML-RPC, CORBA, and communications via raw sockets. The benchmarks are made by Mike Olson and Uche Ogbuji and published in The Overhead of SOAP. It seems that we sacrifice performance to gain ease of programming. Is that what we want?