Programming Web Services with Perl

Book Description

Given Perl's natural fit for web applications development, it's no surprise that Perl is also a natural choice for web services development. It's the most popular web programming language, with strong implementations of both SOAP and XML-RPC, the leading ways to distribute applications using web services. But books on web services focus on writing these applications in Java or Visual Basic, leaving Perl programmers with few resources to get them started. Programming Web Services with Perl changes that, bringing Perl users all the information they need to create web services using their favorite language. Programming Web Services with Perl steers clear of the hype surrounding web services and concentrates on what is useful and practical. The book introduces the major web services standards, such as XML-RPC, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, and shows how to implement Perl servers and clients using these standards. You'll find detailed references on both the XML and SOAP toolkits, and learn when to use one technology in favor of the other. The book is rich with programming examples that you'll find useful well past the learning stage. And, moving beyond the basics, the book offers solutions to problems of security, authentication, and scalability. Some of the topics covered in the book are:

HTTP and XML basics
XML-RPC and the toolkits
SOAP and toolkits
SOAP::Lite
Using SOAP with SMTP and other protocols
Advertising and discovering with UDDI and WSDL
The REST methodology
The future of web services

Programming Web Services with Perl was written for Perl programmers who have no prior knowledge of web services. You can pick up this book without any understanding of XML-RPC or SOAP and be able to apply these technologies easily, through the use of publicly available Perl modules detailed in the book. If you're interested in applying XML-RPC and SOAP technologies to distributed programming applications, then Programming Web Services with Perl is a book you'll want to have.

Customer Reviews:

relevant, practical and well-balanced.......2003-03-24

Programming Web Services with Perl is principally a book on implementing solutions using XML-RPC and SOAP in Perl. It also covers complementary and alternative standards such as WSDL, UDDI, and REST in some detail. And on the periphery, it finishes with a whirlwind tour of developing message routing, alternative data encoding within XML, security, transactions, workflow, internationalization, service discovery, extension, and management techniques and specifications.

The book assumes the reader will have the knowledge of an intermediate level Perl programmer. I.e., the reader is assumed to have a working knowledge of references, data structures, and object-oriented Perl. On the other hand no previous knowledge of XML, XML-RPC, SOAP or XML related technologies is required.

It should also be mentioned that both of the authors Randy J. Ray and Pavel Kulchenko are also the principle developers of the most popular XML-RPC and SOAP Perl modules: XML::RPC and SOAP::Lite respectively. That said, the book is not a soap box for the authors to tout the merits of their tools.

Rather, it is a practical book which starts with grounding fundamentals. Readers should walk away with a core understanding of XML-RPC and SOAP and not just a particular tool set for working with them. The authors examine the alternative XML-RPC and SOAP tools, illustrate how they are used, and give practical and even handed reasons why their modules should be preferred. Which comes down to issues of features, active development, support, and the amount of work required to code to a particular interface. They then settle down to a comfortable and thorough guide to XML::RPC and SOAP::Lite.

The topics and issues are illustrated throughout using real world web services. For example creating an XML-RPC client for O'Reilly's Meerkat news wire, or a SOAP client to covert use.perl.org's journal stream to RSS. Code is presented to the reader filtered down to highlight each particular issue as it is discussed. This is nice in that it avoids listing slight variations of the same code multiple times, but on the down side it can also leave the reader flipping back and forth to reassemble an example in their head. Full code for each example is provided in the appendices. And all of the example code may be downloaded from O'Reilly at [their web site].

All-in-all, the book is a thorough practical introduction to working with XML-RPC, SOAP and related technologies. When I started reading the book, I was a bit disappointed to see that it only covered XML-RPC and SOAP related services. When I finished, I was impressed with how very much information they'd managed to pack into so few pages.

And yet, I was left wishing there'd been a more through coverage of interoperability issues between other SOAP implementations and things like custom de-serializers. To be honest interoperability and de-serialization are mentioned, and the authors do an excellent job of referring the reader on to sources for continued reading on most other topics.

The book does an admirable job balancing content, length, and information density. Not to mention an excellent job delivering the information that will still be relevant years and not just weeks from the date published. Most of the topics I'd wished to see covered in more depth are those that are still developing and consequently most likely to become quickly dated. In short a well balanced practical guide to applying XML-RPC and SOAP to solve problems.

A "complete reference" is oh so hard to find..........2003-03-16

And yet this book covers every aspect of web service development utilizing perl. As a long time user of the original Frontier::RPC2 module, things have come a long way, and with that greater complexity, the concepts have grown in scope considerably. This IS the book that you want to read if you REALLY want to understand SOAP and XML-RPC. From the XML DTD's to implementation code (either standalone applications or utilizing mod_perl) this book covers everything in between. In all it is a welcome addition to the O'Reilly family of Perl books.

Great intro to XML-RPC.......2003-03-08

As with all O'Reilly books there's a great intro to the technologies. They take you through how it works, not just how to deploy some code. When you get to the XML-RPC modules, they don't force a solution on you, but give a great tour of what's available and let you pick. For me, the highlight was the intro to Randy J. Ray's RPC::XML modules (he's also one of the authors). I've been fighting with getting the 'system.*' handlers hacked in with other aproaches and it was great to see someone had already figured out such a clean approach. (Which is something since Perl can get reeeaaal ugly!) This book has saved me many days of wasted development.

The book is worth it just for RPC::XML info.......2003-03-08

The "Web Services" book I've been waiting for.......2003-01-12

Some time ago, I purchased a different book: "Programming Web Services With SOAP" (ASIN: 0596000952), and my feeling - and that of many others - is that it was very weak. A decent view from 30,000 feet, but it was not very helpful to a perl developer thrown kicking and screaming into a project requiring XML and the use of SOAP::Lite. "Disappointment" was the best way to describe it.

But *THIS* is the book that the other one should have been - it's fantastic. It is chock-full of real live examples *with code*, the introductory and explanatory material is excellent, and the writing style is simply a joy to read.

In particular, the reference material for SOAP::Lite is very much welcome: it was written by the author of the code.

Book Description

Sams has assembled a team of experts in web services to provide you with a detailed reference guide on XML, SOAP, USDL and UDDI. Building Web Services with Java is in its second edition and it includes the newest standards for managing security, transactions, reliability and interoperability in web service applications. Go beyond the explanations of standards and find out how and why these tools were designed as they are and focus on practical examples of each concept. Download your source code from the publisher's website and work with a running example of a full enterprise solution. Learn from the best in Building Web Services with Java.

Download Description

Building Web Services with SOAP, XML, and UDDI assumes proficiency with Java and with distributed computing tools. Throughout the book, examples will be presented using Java and the Apache SOAP platform, although a set of sidebars will address .NET development, which Microsoft developers will use to deploy Web services. The book uses progressive disclosure to present an increasingly complex project as it moves through its development cycle. The final section of the book presents linking the completed project with other systems built in J2EE and .NET.

Customer Reviews:

The Bridge Less Travelled.........2007-08-23

The problem with Learning Web Services is just one - there is too much happening..the technology has grappled everyone's attention and a lot of Organizations are on it..
A beginner to web services just doesn't know where to look..strong foundations give 'empire estates', this book does just that
The primer on XML was one of the best i ever read anywhere and i am a big fan of Dr.Google, the clarity of the authors on WSDL Element model is very informative. All in all - if you need a book to trace Web Service concepts and build your foundations - i would strongly refer this book.

If you are looking for a quick reference/book to get started in implementation you should look elsewhere..Sam's 'Teach Yourself Web Services in 24 Hours' is a good choice..but then i believe that this book is definitely worth a reference because it goes a distance conceptually.
Kudos to the authors

An excellent book.......2007-07-30

This book has helped me immensely in implementing some really intense production quality data interchange across systems using web services.

This book will quickly help you understand the entire XML stack of technologies that you will need for Web Services.

The authors have uniquely enabled the readers to develop an understanding of the underlying technologies that make up the web services. Certainly expect to put in some effort in understanding the content.

The worst book.......2005-09-07

The writers either do not understand the topics, or they want to confuse the readers intentionally. You will find their writing style extremly annoying. They use the Skatestown(??) example to mislead the readers whenever they need to explain something. I dont know how such a bad written book can make it out to the book stores. If you buy this book, it will be the biggest waste of money.

sample code is not complete.......2005-03-05

I am still wondering why the authors don't provide all the code, since the book describes an application and that should have been tested and the code is there. Just a few wsdl files don't help very much.

Samples.......2005-01-23

There is an important thing missing in this book: complete samples. It is hard sometimes to understand what they are explaning since you just see a fragment of a WSDD, but not the classes or vice-versa. Since the book is already too long, the authors should have samples in the Internet. They even don't need to explain too much about these complete samples. Leave the developers to comment and validate them in Internet forums. In my view, samples will transform what now is just a so-so book in an excellent one.

Average customer rating:

Complete rubbish
Nice introduction
Nice introduction
Disappointing and thin
No Nonsense Broad Introduction

Programming Web Services with SOAP
James Snell , Doug Tidwell , and Pavel Kulchenko
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0596000952

Book Description

The web services architecture provides a new way to think about and implement application-to-application integration and interoperability that makes the development platform irrelevant. Two applications, regardless of operating system, programming language, or any other technical implementation detail, communicate using XML messages over open Internet protocols such as HTTP or SMTP. The Simple Open Access Protocol (SOAP) is a specification that details how to encode that information and has become the messaging protocol of choice for Web services. Programming Web Services with SOAP is a detailed guide to using SOAP and other leading web services standards--WSDL (Web Service Description Language), and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration protocol). You'll learn the concepts of the web services architecture and get practical advice on building and deploying web services in the enterprise. This authoritative book decodes the standards, explaining the concepts and implementation in a clear, concise style. You'll also learn about the major toolkits for building and deploying web services. Examples in Java, Perl, C#, and Visual Basic illustrate the principles. Significant applications developed using Java and Perl on the Apache Tomcat web platform address real issues such as security, debugging, and interoperability. Covered topic areas include:

The Web Services Architecture
SOAP envelopes, headers, and encodings
WSDL and UDDI
Writing web services with Apache SOAP and Java
Writing web services with Perl's SOAP::Lite
Peer-to-peer (P2P) web services
Enterprise issues such as authentication, security, and identity
Up-and-coming standards projects for web services

Programming Web Services with SOAP provides you with all the information on the standards, protocols, and toolkits you'll need to integrate information services with SOAP. You'll find a solid core of information that will help you develop individual Web services or discover new ways to integrate core business processes across an enterprise.

Customer Reviews:

Complete rubbish.......2003-06-20

I was so keen to learn from this book, but no matter how hard I tried it had too much nonsense to be readable or usable.

Nice introduction.......2002-12-06

If you are new to SOAP and you want to get the overall picture, and you don't care for details, this is the book you need.
If you need a reference guide, this is not the book you want.
If you're looking for a book about SOAP on a particular platform (say Java), this is not the book you need.

Nice introduction.......2002-12-05

If your pretty new at SOAP, and if you need an overview, then this is the book you want.
If you don't care about interoperability, and you just want a book on SOAP within a particular environment (say Java), then this is not the book you want.
If you need a reference guide, then you don't need this book.

Disappointing and thin.......2002-08-17

This book was a disappointment. I got thrown into an XML/SOAP project and had to get up to speed in short order. After struggling on my own for a while I bought this book hoping it would have lots of meat on actually using SOAP::Lite, but it had pretty thin coverage.

I did like the big-picture overview of the various technologies, but it was not very helpful in writing an actual SOAP client to talk to a third party's SOAP server. Considering that the author of SOAP::Lite also wrote this book, it seems to me that there could have been a whole chapter on SOAP::Lite from the client view.

This will stay on my shelf as a reference, but for getting up to speed rapidly on actually writing a SOAP client, it was a bust.

No Nonsense Broad Introduction.......2002-08-05

This book is a nice introduction to SOAP. It doesn't get caught in the Software wars and has examples of most existing systems. Another advantage: it is a thin book and not a 1000 pages bible. So you can easily read it in a weekend and then decide where you want to dig deeper (if necessary).

Designing Web Services with the J2EE(TM) 1.4 Platform: JAX-RPC, SOAP, and XML Technologies (The Java Series)

Average customer rating:

Good Web services book for a J2EE person
Developers are also in a certain way architects, so read it
Great book for the right reader.
Straightforward architectural overview of Java Web Services
A good architectural approach to Java web services...

Designing Web Services with the J2EE(TM) 1.4 Platform: JAX-RPC, SOAP, and XML Technologies (The Java Series)
Inderjeet Singh , Sean Brydon , Greg Murray , Vijay Ramachandran , Thierry Violleau , and Beth Stearns
Manufacturer: Prentice Hall PTR
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0321205219

Customer Reviews:

Good Web services book for a J2EE person.......2006-09-18

his book is primarily geared towards reader familiar withthe J2EE architecture. Code samples are few and far between, and the illustrations are primarily UML. That's cool. For a book from Sun J2EE team, I would like to see a little more code examples (thus the four stars instead of five.)

The book starts with XML basics, then spends the largest portion of the book on SOAP and JAX-RPC, then finishes off with an excellent chapter on security issues. There is some mention of mobile, but detailed enough.

I do suggest this book as a good reading for budding Java architects who want to learn more about this topic.

Developers are also in a certain way architects, so read it.......2005-09-12

As the title of my review says this book is intended for all the people who want to architect and develop web services in a proper way. The technology around Web Services is very splitted. I mean from a lot of separate web associations. When you want to master web services technology you have to know in detail XML, XML Schema, SOAP, UDDI and its support in J2EE.
This book gives architectual overview how these technologies depend on each other, I mean the relationships.
The book is not intended for getting detail information about source code implementation. Anyway, it is from the SUN Blueprint program team. So everybody developing and architecturing web services with J2EE technology should read this book. It is a very dry book. Very talkative. I am glad I have already read it.

Great book for the right reader........2004-11-03

This book provides a very good, well ordered, high-level overview of architectural decisions in a Web Services application. If you have knowledge of J2EE technologies, and want an intro to the Web Services paradigm, this is a good book.

This is not a programmer's reference nor an introduction to J2EE technology.

The book is disciplined in maintaining a high-level overview; most code snippets are purposely contracted to show only the relevant features being discussed. This keeps the code snippets focused, but means that if you are looking for a sample SOAP document that does X, you'll need to look elsewhere.

I liked the organization of the book. Rather than organizing the book around an annotated sample application, the authors
take a more didactic approach; Chapter 1 gives an intro to Web Services, Chapter 2 reviews the alphabet soup of J2EE development and shows how various components either use the technologies or are connected by them.

The next five chapters each take one component of the Web Services domain and review in detail the architectural
decisions to be made in designing that component. In the chapter on Service Endpoint Design, for example, the authors review
two approaches to designing a service interface definition; should you first design a Web Services Definition Language or
should you first design the Java Interfaces? The Chapter on XML reviews the pros and cons of various XML parsers and the use of XML transformations for services which must interact with numerous systems. There are similar chapters reviewing Client design, Integration with the J2EE platform, and Security.

In the last chapter, the authors review their reference application and walk through their decisions.

Throughout, the authors give good advice on the judicious use of various technologies, use of Design Patterns, and designs that will give good, reusable code. The authors several times discuss patterns that will make the application simpler to understand and build upon.

All in all, this is a well written treatment that I highly recommend.

Straightforward architectural overview of Java Web Services.......2004-10-14

This book is primarily geared towards reader at the architectural end of the spectrum. Code samples are few and far between, and the illustrations are primarily UML. That's not a bad thing, it's just a matter of what you are looking for. Though even for an architecture work I would like to see a little more code (thus the four stars instead of five.)

The book starts with XML basics, then spends the largest portion of the book on SOAP and JAX-RPC, then finishes off with an excellent chapter on security issues. There is some mention of mobile, but nothing in depth.

I recommend this book to Java architects who want to learn more about this topic. Front line engineers will probably want to concentrate on API centric books on Java Web Services, most likely from O'Reilly.

A good architectural approach to Java web services..........2004-09-26

If you're looking for a good architectural treatment of web services in Java, you'll want to look at Designing Web Services with the J2EE 1.4 Platform - JAX-RPC, SOAP, and XML Technologies by Inderjeet Singh, Sean Brydon, Greg Murray, Vijay Ramachandran, Thierry Violleau, and Beth Stearns (Addison Wesley).

Chapter list: Introduction; Standards and Technologies; Service Endpoint Design, XML Processing; Client Design; Enterprise Application Integration; Security; Application Architecture and Design; Glossary; Index

As with most books put out by Sun, this is an authoritative guide. The quality of the material is high, and you are getting it "straight from the source", as they tout their books. While they cover the subject well, it's not the type of book that the hard-code developer geek would want. It seems to target more of the system architect position... the person who would be responsible for designing the overall approach to a system and specifying the technologies to be used. There is some code, but not much. It's also not a tutorial approach, either. But when you get done, you should have an excellent understanding of how web service architectures are designed using Java and technologies supported by Sun.

Hacking with Ruby: Ruby and Rails for the Real World

Average customer rating:

Hacking with Ruby: Ruby and Rails for the Real World
Mark Watson
Manufacturer: Manning Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1932394745

Book Description

Enterprise software development is labor-intensive. And it is made more costly than necessasry by some of the most popular technologies which can be needlessly complex. The combination of Ruby and Ruby on Rails provides a simple, stable platform for cost-effective software development.

Book Description

SOA is one of the latest technologies enterprises are using to tame their software costs - in development, deployment, and management. SOA makes integration easy, helping enterprises not only better utilize their existing investments in applications and infrastructure, but also open up new business opportunities. However, one of the big stumbling blocks in executing SOA is security. This book addresses Security in SOA with detailed examples illustrating the theory, industry standards and best practices.

It is true that security is important in any system. SOA brings in additional security concerns as well rising out of the very openness that makes it attractive. If we apply security principles blindly, we shut ourselves of the benefits of SOA. Therefore, we need to understand which security models and techniques are right for SOA. This book provides such an understanding.

Usually, security is seen as an esoteric topic that is better left to experts. While it is true that security requires expert attention, everybody, including software developers, designers, architects, IT administrators and managers need to do tasks that require very good understanding of security topics. Fortunately, traditional security techniques have been around long enough for people to understand and apply them in practice. This, however, is not the case with SOA Security.

Anyone seeking to implement SOA Security is today forced to dig through a maze of inter-dependent specifications and API docs that assume a lot of prior experience on the part of readers. Getting started on a project is hence proving to be a huge challenge to practitioners. This book seeks to change that. It provides bottom-up understanding of security techniques appropriate for use in SOA without assuming any prior familiarity with security topics on the part of the reader.

Book Description

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is everywhere. It provides a standardized, versatile, and cross-platform way of describing and structuring data. With nearly 8.5 million units shipped worldwide, FileMaker is the leading workgroup database software for quickly creating and sharing business solutions. XML further extends the reach of FileMaker Pro 6. With the XML support in FileMaker Pro 6, developers and power users can create solutions that connect workgroups and other users with a virtually limitless number of other applications. Building upon earlier support of XML, the new FileMaker Pro 6 has integrated XML import/export in the application, to become even better connected to enterprise applications, systems, and business processes.

How to Avoid SOA Chaos with a UDDI Registry Presentation

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How to Avoid SOA Chaos with a UDDI Registry Presentation
ZapThink , and Jason Bloomberg
Manufacturer: ZapThink, LLC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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Book Description

Presentation for the Systinet Webinar on October 28, 2004.

Book Description

A management infrastructure is a critical requirement for building and running Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). In particular, managing the relationship between Web Service providers (the systems that provide Services) and the Web Service consumers (the systems that utilize these Services) in order to insure loose coupling between consumers and providers is especially important to maintain two core benefits of SOA: asset reuse and business agility.

While there are many management products on the market that enable IT personnel to manage Service providers, Infravio's X-registry is one of the few products on the market today that also allows for the management of Service consumers. Through the use of Web Services Delivery Contracts that specify Service consumers' security, protocol, and service level requirements, X-registry fills the missing link in the SOA management chain: the management of Service consumers.

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