January 2008
Intermediate to advanced
980 pages
28h 47m
English
Content preview from Ajax: The Definitive GuideBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 18. Web Services: The APIs
We have discussed the basics of how web services work, and we touched on how to use them, but we have not discussed what services are already available. After all, if you have defined a module in an application to fetch a certain bit of information, it would be better defined as a publicly available service, if possible. You do not want to reinvent the wheel if you do not have to.
To that end, publicly available web services have supplied developers with the APIs to their services to make it easier to use them. This is also helpful for getting “up and running” quickly, something that is important in today’s world of rapid application deployment. It would be impossible, however, to go over all of the publicly available web services that exist today; new ones pop up all the time while old and obsolete ones disappear, and a service’s interface could change over time to better reflect the needs of developers.
Instead, I will highlight some of the better known, well-documented, and more readily used web services to give you a leg up on beginning to develop with them. And though they may change, at least you’ll have the foundation available to begin programming.
Publicly Available Web Services
An important thing for a web developer to know is what services are out there and how to use them. Without this knowledge, you have to search the Internet for what you need and hope that you find it in a short amount of time. Otherwise, it is costing you or your employer—as ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.