seekda Web Services Blogs

Are you a Web Service Technology Expert or do you have the ultimate plan how to realize a phenomenal Web API? Do you enjoy discovering new ways of using service technologies or addressing real-world technical challenges of modern distributed applications? Then enter seekda’s Web Service Ideas Contest and win a notebook or an iPod!

Web Service Ideas Contest is a competition in which you use your imagination to envision how real world problems can be solved with Web Service technologies. Take part in our contest and let us know about your ideas of how services could be used in completely new contexts. To win a notebook you simply have to describe what your conceived Web Service should be able to do and who might use it for what purpose.

Here’s how it works: All you need is to login (or register) and fill out the submission form. You will have till the 26th of September to describe your idea for a great service.

To learn more details and how to register, please visit: http://seekda.com/contest

We are looking forward to seeing your great ideas!

Now you have one more possibility to get in touch with us, to offer us your feedback and to help us improve everything we do. To get instantaneous answers to your questions, just follow the chat link visible on the top of the right menu on most pages (e.g. http://seekda.com). The link will be only visible if one of our team members is actually online. When initiating a chat you will be put in a queue and unless we are in the middle of the night in Europe (although many of us work also at night, so you can always give it a try), you will be connected directly to one of us. We will be more than happy to answer any of your questions.
Continue reading “Get in Touch with Us in Real Time” »

UDDI was proposed as a solution to publish and search services. UDDI defines data structures relevant to service discovery and a set of APIs to access them. The standard was supported by major software vendors such as IBM, Microsoft and SAP. Although UDDI was claimed to become successful in restricted and controlled environments (there are several implementations of UDDI servers available for the internal use these days), it has not prevailed in the domain of publicly available Web Services (you can read more about shutdown of IBM, Microsoft and SAP public UDDI registries and many articles discussing this topic as old as 2004, just to mention some of them for reference from pluralsight, techtarget or realworldsoa at inforworld).

We are frequently asked by users of seekda Web Services search engine if seekda develops or aims to develop a public UDDI registry. To be more specific what people really mean are UDDI APIs allowing to access seekda in a programmatic way. The short answer is that we are neither doing nor planning to do so in a short term. However at the same time we believe that we can learn a lot from the work done by UDDI designers and creators of public UDDI registries. We do not completely neglect the future possibility of implementing the standardized UDDI APIs (or ebXML registry APIs). Anyway at this stage we do not consider UDDI APIs as a very essential feature which would improve search for public Web Services and the exponential growth of Web of services.
Continue reading “The Fairytale of UDDI Registry and Public Web Services” »

When I am reading about mashups, I am getting often an impression that REST folks are trying to take over this term and restrict it mainly to REST based services. Equally at the same time in the Web Services community we got used to hear about Web Services composition, but not really about Web Services mashups (although there are of course exceptions). While both terms are not really equivalent, there are some overlaps and basically there is nothing preventing us from using Web Services to provide appealing mashups for Web applications. At seekda we strongly support the idea that Web APIs should be based not on one, but on different technologies. We can successfully mashup Web Services and REST services together to compose good Web applications so in our opinion the discussion about superiority of one technology over the other is quite pointless. The user is important and a new functionality we can provide to him or her; not really the technology or terminology, which have been used by particular communities. In this new series of tutorials, which I will call “Services by Example”, I will be mashing up (composing) various Web APIs to show how in a couple of simple steps to deliver mashups, which could not be produced, when using standard software libraries. Today I will show how to make a useful application composed of Web Services coming from two different service providers.
Continue reading “Services by Example: Web Services Composition” »

At seekda our developers never sleep… That statement is maybe an exaggeration , but the truth is that while lots of seekda development effort is currently committed to development of Web Services marketplace (read about seekda innovation in our about section), we continue to enhance the existing Web Services search engine portal with many new and useful features.

With our recent deployment, the history of viewed Web Services is now available to you from the context menu. It remains invisible until you browse for the first time the page of a particular Web Services. Once you find your first Web Service, the history box gets activated in the left context menu.
Continue reading “Recently Viewed Web Services” »

Since March 2008 seekda users can test every Web Services found at seekda using our online Web Service Tester. We have presented the Web Service Tester in our March article. Basically the seekda Web Service Tester enables to quickly check whether a particular Web Service is exactly doing what you want without writing a single line of code.

The data collected on how often a Web Services is used gives us some indication of its usefulness. Since we believe this can also be interesting for both consumer and providers of Web Services, we have created a special page with these Web Services that have been tested most often. The number of tests by different users is one of many criteria which influences our ranking: we also keep track of how often a service is viewed or commented on, as well as take its availability (read about details in Monitoring the Availability of Web Services article) into consideration.

Lets dive into our second part of demystifying Web Services tutorial and writing your first (second :)) Web Services Client (you might want to read first part 1 about Finding and Testing Web Services Tutorial). Again, I do not want to show you how to write a new Web Service, as I personally believe that it is more motivational for a new user of Web Services technologies to use existing service to grasp an idea of them, rather than to write services themselves. That is why we will find and use an existing Web Service and write some useful Web application. I will use for this tutorial Java, Tomcat and Eclipse. If you have these installed on your machine, then in 10-15 minutes you should have your application up and running. Otherwise you have to reserve more time to download and install required components. Anyway, once you are done with installations, the practical part of this tutorial will be very short as I have cut everything to absolute minimum. I want you to use Web Services, not to waste your time on understanding bits and bytes of their particular protocols (this you can find yourself in WSDL and SOAP specifications and various more advanced tutorials available on the Web).
Continue reading “Write Your First Web Services Client Part 2: Using Services” »

Since we have released the initial version of our Web Service Tester, we have implemented a series of bug fixes and additional features. From now on you are able to use the seekda Web Service Tester also without opening an account with us. Only if you are using this service on a regular basis, you will need to login to do an unlimited number of invocations.

One of the new features we have introduced is the support of the XML schema data type base64Binary. If you wonder when you need it, here is one quick example of a service that uses this data type to enable you to upload files:
Continue reading “Web Service Tester Freely Available” »

I have realized that most of the available tutorials about Web Services for newbies show how to write a first Web Service example (usually “Hello World”, or a fake “Currency Exchange”), deploy it on the local server and next how to write a Web Services client for it, but actually not really how to use existing Web Services, which are already available on the Web. Is this really what a newcomer expects to learn when hearing for the first time about Web Services technologies such as XML, SOAP or WSDL? How to write fake services, which are not of any practical use for his/her applications or get confused with XML details? I do not really think so! Also because of this approach, newbies might have a perception that Web Services technologies are unnecessary complicated and difficult, not worth of investing their time. At the end of the day if I have to write all this code myself to get a Web Service example up and running, is it not simply a better idea to connect directly to my own database, write my own class, java bean or anything what is simple, instead of using Web Services. So lets try to make a practical 2 minutes Web Services tutorial for newbies, which actually delivers something real, which cannot be extracted from the local database or coded in an internal class of the application. And the most important, lets use not fake ones, but real Web Services!
Continue reading “Write Your First Web Services Client Part 1: Finding and Testing Services” »

… just got the following mail from an enthusiastic seekda user:

I am a researcher and a developer involved in a couple of EU projects. In one of the projects, specifically SWING (Semantic Web Services Interoperability for Geospatial Decision Making, FP6 STREP, http://www.swing-project.org), I needed to translate several words (ontology concept names, to be more specific) from English to some other language (e.g. French). Automatically, of course. First I tought it will take me at least a weak to get some machine translation lib figured out but it actually took me only two minutes with seekda I simply typed in the query “translation” and selected one of the listed Web services. I created the stub for C# and wrote these few lines of code:

public static void Main()  {
   TranslationMode transl_mode_obj = new TranslationMode();
   transl_mode_obj.ObjectID = "en_de";
   TranslationService transl_srv = new TranslationService();
   Console.WriteLine(transl_srv.Translate(transl_mode_obj,  "Seekda is extremely useful!"));
}

When I ran it, I got the following output:
Continue reading “Finding a Translation Service” »