Introduction to Web Services

Asst. Prof. Chaiporn Jaikaeo, Ph.D.

chaiporn.j@ku.ac.th
http://www.cpe.ku.ac.th/~cpj
Computer Engineering Department
Kasetsart University, Bangkok, Thailand
 Traditional World-Wide-Web
 Designed for human-to-app interactions
 Information sharing
 (Non-automated) E-commerce
 Built on top of
 HTTP – for data transfer
 HTML – for representing document

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 What's Next?
 Try taking humans out of the loop
 Systematic application-to-application
interaction over the web
 Automated e-commerce
 Resource sharing
 Distributed computing
 Web services
 (another) effort to build distributed computing
platform for the web
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 Web Services vs. Web Apps
 Web application
 Provides service directly to user
browser web server
HTTP

 Web service or (Web API)

 Provides service to other programs
web server
(service provider)
app HTTP
(service user)

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 Web Service Protocols
 Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)
 Service requests and responses are always done
via XML messages, called SOAP envelope
 Formally supported by World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C)

 Representational State Transfer (REST)

 Service requests are done via generic HTTP
commands: GET, POST, PUT, DELETE
 Simpler set of operations

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 Other Web Service Protocols
 Web feeds
 RSS
 Atom
 Remote procedure call
 JSON-RPC
 XML-RPC
 JavaScript

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 Sample SOAP Message
 E.g., message requesting IBM stock price
POST /InStock HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.org
Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 299 HTTP Header
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope">
<soap:Header>
</soap:Header>
<soap:Body>
<m:GetStockPrice xmlns:m="http://www.example.org/stock">
<m:StockName>IBM</m:StockName>
</m:GetStockPrice>
</soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope> SOAP Envelope
Desired operation Object of interest
(Verb) (Noun)
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 Sample REST Request
 E.g., message requesting IBM stock price

GET /stock/ibm HTTP/1.1

Host: www.example.org HTTP Header
Desired operation Object of interest
(Verb) (Noun)

The above corresponds to the URL

http://www.example.org/stock/ibm

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 Data Interchange Formats
 XML – eXtensible Markup Language
 E.g., RSS, Atom
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/">
<title>Slashdot</title>
<link>http://slashdot.org/</link>
<description>News for nerds, stuff that matters</description>
<dc:subject>Technology</dc:subject>
<items>
<rdf:Seq>
<rdf:li rdf:resource="http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/02/14/0337211/Recent-HP-
Laptops-Shipped-CPU-Choking-Wi-Fi-Driver?from=rss" />
</ref:Seq>
</items>
</rdf:RDF>

 Large collection of libraries for processing XML

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 Data Interchange Formats
 JSON – JavaScript Object Notation
 Can be directly evaluated in JavaScript
 Typically smaller than XML
 Libraries for other languages are also available
{ <Person>
"Person": <firstName>John</firstName>
{ <lastName>Smith</lastName>
"firstName": "John", <age>25</age>
"lastName": "Smith", <Address>
"age": 25, <streetAddress>21 2nd Street</streetAddress>
"Address": <city>New York</city>
{ <state>NY</state>
"streetAddress":"21 2nd Street", <postalCode>10021</postalCode>
"city":"New York", </Address>
"state":"NY", <PhoneNumbers>
"postalCode":"10021" <home>212 555-1234</home>
}, <fax>646 555-4567</fax>
"PhoneNumbers":
{
</PhoneNumbers>
</Person> XML
"home":"212 555-1234",
"fax":"646 555-4567"
}

}
}
JSON
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 Example –Wikipedia
 RESTful
 API reference
 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
 Example
 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=json&action=q
uery&titles=Kasetsart%20University&prop=revisions&rvp
rop=content

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 Example – HostIP.info
 RESTful
 Determines geographical location of the
specified IP address
 API documentation
 http://www.hostip.info/use.html
 Example
 http://api.hostip.info/get_json.php?ip=158.108.2.71

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 Coding Example
 E.g., accessing HostIP.info from Python
import sys
import json
from urllib import urlencode
from urllib2 import urlopen

response = urlopen('http://api.hostip.info/get_json.php?' +
urlencode({
'ip' : sys.argv[1],
}))

data = json.loads(response.read())
print 'IP Address: %s' % data['ip']
print 'City: %s' % data['city']
print 'Country: %s' % data['country_name']

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 Mashups
 A mashup is a webpage or application that offers
new services by combining data or functionality
from two or more sources
 Main characteristics of mashups
 Combination
 Visualization
 Aggregation
 They aim to make existing data more useful
 Example: Wikipediavision
 Google Maps + Wikipedia
 http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/index.html

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 More Resources
 Search engine for web APIs and mashups
 http://www.programmableweb.com

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