1. Web Services in 5 minutes Tim Lynch National Agricultural Library US Department of Agriculture tlynch@nal.usda.gov

2. Web Services in 5 minutes “Web Services” is the term given to the networking technologies that facilitate communication among web servers or web sites. Web Services has little, if anything, to do with the user’s browser.

3. Web Services in 5 minutes Why do servers need to talk to each other? Consider: Buying a book at Amazon Booking a flight, hotel, or car online

4. Web Services in 5 minutes Buying a book at Amazon Amazon contacts bank to approve credit card Amazon contacts warehouse to verify stock Amazon or warehouse contacts publisher to restock

5. Web Services in 5 minutes Booking a flight, hotel, or car online Agency contacts airlines for available tickets Multiple vendors bid on sale Agency contacts bank to approve credit card Etc., etc.

6. Web Services in 5 minutes Key attributes of Web Services technology ReliableSecureScaleableCross-platform

7. Web Services in 5 minutes Web Services technology is extensible Commerce Sales, Search, Calendar … Government Document exchange, Search, Directories … Education Scheduling, Testing, Collaboration … Scientific Research High-performance computing, data conversion …

8. Web Services in 5 minutes Example: Terminology Services Problem: Web Site A provides a multi-lingual thesaurus Web Site B provides a database of environmental information in one language How can Site B offer multi-lingual searching?

9. Web Services in 5 minutes Example: Terminology Services Solution: Web site A provides multi-lingual thesaurus as web service. web service. Web site B “consumes” site A’s thesaurus as web service to translate queries on-the-fly web service to translate queries on-the-fly

10. Web Services in 5 minutes Acronym soup XML-RPC : Remote Procedure Call SOAP : Simple Object Access Protocol SOAP : Simple Object Access Protocol RSS : Really Simple Syndication RSS : Really Simple Syndication Start with : www.w3.org www.w3.org

11. Web Services in 5 minutes Tim Lynch National Agricultural Library US Department of Agriculture tlynch@nal.usda.gov