| The core idea behind Real World Web Services is simple:
after years of hype, what are the major players really doing
with web services? Standard bodies may wrangle and platform
vendors may preach, but at the end of the day what are the
technologies that are actually in use, and how can
developers incorporate them into their own applications?
Those are the answers Real World Web Services delivers. It's
a field guide to the wild and wooly world of non-trivial
deployed web services.
The heart of the book is a series of projects, demonstrating
the use and integration of Google, Amazon, eBay, PayPal,
FedEx, and many more web services. Some of these vendors
have been extremely successful with their web service
deployments: for example, eBay processes over a billion web
service requests a month!
The author focuses on building 8 fully worked out example
web applications that incorporate the best web services
available today. The book thoroughly documents how to add
functionality like automating listings for auctions,
dynamically calculating shipping fees, automatically sending
faxes to your suppliers, using an aggregator to pull data
from multiple news and web service feeds into a single
format or monitoring the latest weblog discussions and
Google searches to keep web site visitors on top of topics
of interest-by integrating APIs from popular websites most
people are already familiar with.
For each example application, the author provides a thorough
overview, architecture, and full working code examples.
This book doesn't engage in an intellectual debate as to the
correctness of web services on a theological level.
Instead, it focuses on the practical, real world usage of
web services as the latest evolution in distributed
computing, allowing for structured communication via
Internet protocols. As you ll see, this includes everything
from sending HTTP GET commands to retrieving an XML document
through the use of SOAP and various vendor SDKs.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT 
Published by: O'REILLY & ASSOCIATES