Everything's coming up Web Services this week! First Google releases its Google Web API, and then Amazon presents its Amazons Associates XML interface: "By putting Amazon.com XML directly into your hands, you'll now have the flexibility to display dynamic product information in any way you choose." For a first simple application, see the right pane on Rael's site. Amazox is a simple Perl script making a call to the Amazon Associates XML interface and displaying the results in a table, suitable for inclusion in a Web page.
"The first simplistic applications of Google's API will predictably be 'Google Boxes,' relevant search results incorporated into portal and weblog pages. Google's API opens a dialogue with the developers and researchers inventing the next Internet and quite possibly shaping the future of Google itself. By exposing its cache of over 2 billion Web pages via simple Web services, the Google Web API is a breath of fresh air in a specification-dense yet implementation-sparse arena." (Rael)
"An interesting debate over the merits of the Amazon API versus the Google API: the Amazon API is dirt-simple to use; simply pass parameters to it via the URL, as you would any Web page, and you get the results back in pure XML (Simon St. Laurent points out that the Amazon API is very REST-like). Google, on the other hand, requires that a SOAP call to be fashioned and POSTed. It seems pretty laborious when you realize that there's nothing Google's giving us that couldn't be done via a URL. A SOAP interface makes more sense if you need to send and receive complex datatypes (something beyond a one-dimensional list of name-value pairs) to invoke a particular method over a network, but you have to question whether all that overhead is really necessary just to get a list of search results or spelling suggestions." (Scott Andrew)
Recommended Reading on oreillynet.com:
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