[kw-pm] xml

[Daniel R. Allen]

...So you mean that communicating application-to-application over the web
is made easier by wrapping things up in another layer of encapsulation
than by parsing the webpage output and submitting standard forms?

Just to play devil's advocate- even if it would be easier to use, my bank
hasn't published an XML-RPC interface so I can do things my own way, and I
bet they never will.  If I want to interact with them, or with most other
websites, I need to either write the parsing tools myself, or find
somebody who's already done it (such as with Mail::Webmail::Yahoo or
WWW::Search).  Who's to say that CPAN authors won't do a better job of it
than the banks and credit-card companies and car-rental companies and
governments (who probably don't even care?)

Just being devil's advocate here. :-)

--
http://coder.com/ - Prescient Code Solutions - (519) 575-3733 da at coder.com

On Sun, 22 Feb 2004, lloyd carr wrote:

> > Apart from the acronyms, web services are published protocols for
> > applications to talk to each other via the web.  They let your perl
> > programs talk directly to google and amazon for example.
> >
> > Why use these instead of WWW::Mechanize or other webpage-parsing
> > modules?... Good question...
>
> UGH Daniel! Why use a service in place of HTML scraping?!
> Why use XML when HTML will do just fine?!? :-(
> Why use XML-RPC in place of CGI?!
>
> As Daniel demonstrated in his excellent talk on modules, of which his beer
> coasters are an excellent example, it is a great good to hide the
> complexity and specifics of you implementation as inside a module. Dare I
> say that is an even greater good, that in addition to hiding the
> complexity and specifics of your implementation, you make it possible that
> the client and service need not reside on the same machine or be written
> in the same language or be running on the same OS!
>
> The hype and acronym
> soup may collapse under it's own weight, as it should, but I can still see
> many applications in our heterogeneous networked world.
>
> The web in web service is perhaps misleading, the WWW of browsing and
> surfing is only the smallest fraction of where this technology could be used.
>
> -Lloyd
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