Web Services and the Amazon Wish List Plugin for Wordpress
Daryl Houston has written a plugin for Wordpress that will get retrieve an
Amazon Wish List. This is a neat way of displaying a random item from my Wish List in my journal page.
This plugin is made possible using Amazon’s Web Service API to its store platform. While its been hyped for many years, the Web Services technology provide a convenient mechanism for connecting to remote services. There are a handful of such services around, of which Amazon, Google and Salesforce provide one of the best examples of how a Web Service API can be used to make their services available to the community.
Amazon’s Web Services provides access to their storefront and vast database of goods for sale (books, videos, music amongst others). It is also a gateway to query their vast community of reviewers and users. The wishlist is one of the features that allow users to maintain a list of items that they desire.
Google’s Web APIs allow developers to query this Internet index using SOAP and WSDL. Armed with the full set of APIs, it becomes almost a window to the entire Web - searching for related news articles, embedded spell-checking, and other interesting applications are now possible.
Salesforce.com’s Sforce platform is uninteresting for the average user. To a developer of business applications, it is an excellent example of how an enterprise application can expose its services to developers over the web. This is probably the closest yet to an “application-on-demand”. Users can now customise their online application just as they would do a traditional enterprise applications - allowing the application to be extended easily.
Another early innovator in the enterprise integration space is Grand Central. Unlike Salesforce, this vendor does not sell business applications, but provides an integration infrastructure instead. Competing with established makers of integration software like webMethods and TIBCO, Grand Central hopes to introduce “integration-as-a-service”. This integration of business data and processes across different partners does not require the deployment of software infrastructure, but instead offers customers the choice of performing integration activities on a hosted network. Clients configure data mapping, connectivity and business processes that connect to their partners through Grand Central’s online application. Messages and sent and received through this conduit which is responsible for data and process integration work. An interesting experiment which will be worth following.