Why Web Services? - PHP

Although the typical developer generally adheres to a loosely defined set of practices and tools, much as an artist generally works with a particular medium and style, he tends to create software in the way he sees most fit. As such, it doesn’t come as a surprise that although many programs resemble one another in look and behavior, the similarities largely stop there. Numerous deficiencies arise as a result of this refusal to follow generally accepted programming principles, with software being developed at a cost of maintainability, scalability, extensibility, and interoperability.

This problem of interoperability has become even more pronounced over the past few years, given the incredible opportunities for cooperation that the Internet has opened up to businesses around the world. However, fully exploiting an online business partnership often, if not always, involves some level of system integration. Therein lies the problem: if the system designers never consider the possibility that they might one day need to tightly integrate their application with another, how will they ever really be able to exploit the Internet to its fullest advantage? Indeed, this has been a subject of considerable discussion almost from the onset of this new electronic age.

Web Services technology is today’s most promising solution to the interoperability problem. Rather than offer up yet another interpretation of the definition of Web Services, here’s an excellent interpretation provided in the W3C’s “Web Services Architecture” document (http://www.w3.org/TR/ws-arch/):

A Web Service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with the Web Service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards.

Some of these terms may be alien to the newcomer; not to worry, because they’re introduced later in the chapter. What is important to keep in mind is that Web Services open up endless possibilities to the enterprise, a sampling of which follows:

Software as a service: Imagine building an e-commerce application that requires a means for converting currency among various exchange rates. However, rather than take it upon yourself to devise some means for automatically scraping the Federal Reserve Bank’s Web page (http:// www.federalreserve.gov/releases/) for the daily released rate, you instead take advantage of its (hypothetical) Web Service for retrieving these values. The result is far more readable code, with much less chance for error from presentational changes on the Web page.

Significantly lessened Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) horrors: Developers currently are forced to devote enormous amounts of time to hacking together often complex solutions to integrate disparate applications. Contrast this with connecting two Web Service–enabled applications, in which the process is highly standardized and reusable no matter the language.

Write once, reuse everywhere: Because Web Services offer platform-agnostic interfaces to exposed application methods, they can be simultaneously used by applications running on a variety of operating systems. For example, a Web Service running on an e-commerce server might be used to keep the CEO abreast of inventory numbers via both a Windows-based client application and a Perl script running on a Linux server that generates daily e-mails that are sent to the executive team.

Ubiquitous access: Because Web Services typically travel over HTTP, firewalls can be bypassed because port 80 (and 443 for HTTPS) traffic is almost always allowed. Although debate rages as to whether this is really prudent, for the moment it is indeed an appealing solution to the often difficult affair of firewall penetration.

Such capabilities are tantalizing to the developer. Believe it or not, as is demonstrated throughout this chapter, you can actually begin taking advantage of Web Services right now.

Ultimately, only one metric will determine the success of Web Services: acceptance. Interestingly, several global companies have already made quite a stir by offering Web Services application programming interfaces (APIs) to their treasured data stores. Among the most interesting offers include those provided by the online superstore Amazon.com, Google, and Microsoft, stirring the imagination of the programming industry with their freely available standards-based Web Services. Since their respective releases, all three implementations have sparked the imaginations of programmers worldwide, who have gained valuable experience working with a well-designed Web Services architecture plugged into an enormous amount of data.

Follow these links to learn more about these popular APIs:

1. http://www.amazon.com/webservices/
   
2. http://www.google.com/apis/ 
    
3. http://msdn.microsoft.com/mappoint/