Simon Willison's Weblog: web-services

Is there a online service which provides details of all the events happening in a city?

2012-12-10T14:05:00+00:00

My answer to Is there a online service which provides details of all the events happening in a city? on Quora

The answer to this varies greatly from city to city. As a general rule though, no, there is no single service that can solve this (it's actually an almost impossible problem to solve since events are by their nature decentralised).

It can be solved for specific categories of event. Songkick has extremely comprehensive gig listings, for example. Our startup, Lanyrd, aims to solve the sub-set of this problem that relates to conferences and professional events. We have pages for hundreds of cities, for example Conferences in London and Conferences in San Francisco.

Individual cities often have their own listings sites - often run by magazines or newspapers (TimeOut is a good bet for a lot of cities). There are also often niche-specific listings sites for e.g. tech events in a given area.

Tags: events, web-services, quora

Are there any website thumbnail services that generate images in real-time?

2012-06-26T11:37:00+00:00

My answer to Are there any website thumbnail services that generate images in real-time? on Quora

http://url2png.com/ generates images on demand - you pass the URL directly to the service and it replies with a PNG image. The first load can take a few seconds (depending on how long it takes the originating site to serve up the assets etc) but they cache the generated images so future requests for the same URL will be served instantly.

Tags: apis, web-development, web-services, quora

Is there an API that returns metadata for a given URL?

2012-05-31T16:01:00+00:00

My answer to Is there an API that returns metadata for a given URL? on Quora

I suggest taking a look at http://embed.ly/ - it can take a huge range of URLs and turn them in to JSON metadata. Here's what it can do with a Wikipedia page: http://embed.ly/docs/explore/obj... - and here's Google Maps URL (not as useful, but still some interesting metadata extracted) http://embed.ly/docs/explore/obj...

Tags: apis, urls, web-services, quora

Yahoo! Term Extraction and Contextual Web Search services to be discontinued

2009-08-12T11:57:27+00:00

Yahoo! Term Extraction and Contextual Web Search services to be discontinued

The official closure date is August 31st. Term extraction was really useful—thankfully there are a number of decent alternatives such as Zemanta, OpenCalais and topia.termextract.

Tags: opencalais, termextractor, topia, web-services, yahoo, zemanta

geocoders

2009-05-27T10:02:54+00:00

geocoders

A fifteen minute project extracted from something else I’m working on—an ultra simple Python API for geocoding a single string against Google, Yahoo! Placemaker, GeoNames and (thanks to Jacob) Yahoo! Geo’s web services.

Tags: geocoders, geocoding, geonames, github, google, jacob-kaplan-moss, placemaker, projects, python, web-services, yahoo

Quoting Dare Obasanjo

2008-10-24T13:39:11+00:00

The key thing to remember is that REST is about building software that scales to usage on the World Wide Web by being a good participant of the Web ecosystem. Ideally a RESTful API should be designed to be implementable by thousands of websites and consumed by hundreds of applications running on dozens of platforms with zero coupling between the client applications and the Web services.

— Dare Obasanjo

Tags: dare-obasanjo, rest, web-services

We're Never Content

2008-09-18T12:30:44+00:00

We're Never Content

Amazon will be releasing a proper edge caching CDN on top of S3 “before the end of the year”.

Tags: amazon, cdn, s3, web-services

Quoting Damien Katz

2008-08-15T08:07:06+00:00

If it's easy to make all your calls conform to the RESTful verb architecture, then that's good, I guess. But if not, then just use a POST as an RPC call, keep it as simple as possible and be done with it. And don't spend another minute worrying about being RESTful or not.

— Damien Katz

Tags: restful, rest, damien-katz, http, web-services, post, rpc

GeoNames Commercial Webservices

2008-05-18T10:32:20+00:00

GeoNames Commercial Webservices

Wikinear has been loading slowly recently, so I’ve signed up for GeoNames very reasonably priced commercial plan which provides access to better servers at their end. This might speed things up to the point that I can reliably run the site on Google AppEngine, which times out aggressively if an external HTTP request takes too long.

Tags: geonames, google-app-engine, web-services, wikinear

Google AJAX Search API: Flash and Server Side Access

2008-04-22T19:16:50+00:00

Google AJAX Search API: Flash and Server Side Access

Over a year after Google shot down their SOAP Search API, they’ve quietly released a JSON based one under the guise of supporting “Flash and other non JavaScript environments”. Comes with the strange requirement that an HTTP referer be sent with every request; the API key is optional.

Tags: ajax, apis, google, json, search, soap, web-services

Quoting Ryan Tomayko

2008-01-13T23:34:19+00:00

I've never heard anyone from the REST camp claim that building distributed systems was "easy". [...] The WS-* folks have historically been obsessed with making things easy, usually for an imaginary business analyst who is nowhere near as technically adept as they. The REST folks, on the other hand, seem much more interested in keeping the entire stack simple, and for everyone involved.

— Ryan Tomayko

Tags: simplicity, rest, ws-star, web-services, ryan-tomayko

Amazon SimpleDB overview

2007-12-14T11:39:55+00:00

Amazon SimpleDB overview

Attribute values are limited to 1,024 bytes; Amazon suggest that you store larger fields in S3 and use SimpleDB to query metadata about those objects.

Tags: amazon, metadata, s3, simpledb, web-services

What You Need To Know About Amazon SimpleDB

2007-12-14T11:21:37+00:00

What You Need To Know About Amazon SimpleDB

Amazon have finally launched the database component of their web service suite. It fits a bunch of current trends: key/value pairs, schemaless, built on top of Erlang. “Eventual consistency” is an interesting characteristic.

Tags: amazon, charles-ying, databases, erlang, hashtables, scaling, schemaless, simpledb, web-services

WS-dämmerung

2007-11-22T09:49:02+00:00

WS-dämmerung

Tim Bray collects the latest round of WS-* repenting, which saves me from linking to them individually.

Tags: soap, tim-bray, web-services, ws-star

Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement

2007-10-09T00:52:14+00:00

Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement

Went in to effect on the 1st of October. Promises 99.9% uptime over a monthly billing cycle or you get “service credits” towards future S3 payments.

Via Jeffrey McManus

Tags: amazon, aws, jeffrey-mcmanus, s3, sla, uptime, web-services

OAuth: Your valet key for the Web

2007-09-21T23:34:51+00:00

OAuth: Your valet key for the Web

OAuth is a really important new specification that aims to solve the “give this application permission to do X on my behalf” problem once and for all.

Tags: apis, authentication, oauth, openid, specification, web-services

Quoting Elliotte Rusty Harold

2007-07-07T09:40:37+00:00

WS-* is North Korea and REST is South Korea. While REST will go on to become an economic powerhouse with steadily increasing standards of living for all its citizens, WS-* is doomed to sixty years of starvation, poverty, tyranny, and defections until it eventually collapses from its own fundamental inadequacies and is absorbed into the more sensible policies of its neighbor to the South.

— Elliotte Rusty Harold

Tags: rest, web-services, ws-star, korea, northkorea, southkorea, elliotte-rusty-harold

Quoting Dare Obasanjo

2007-05-26T22:23:52+00:00

Now if WS-* technologies wants to own the niche of one proprietary platform technology talking to another in a homogeneous, closed environment...who cares? Good riddance I say. Just keep that shit off the Web.

— Dare Obasanjo

Tags: ws-star, dare-obasanjo, web-services

soaplib

2007-02-12T22:26:53+00:00

soaplib

New open-source Python SOAP library, with a pleasantly Pythonic looking API.

Via Jonathan LaCour

Tags: jonathan-lacour, python, soap, soaplib, web-services

Quoting Nick Gall

2007-01-27T13:55:30+00:00

Web Services based on SOAP and WSDL are "Web" in name only. In fact, they are a hostile overlay of the Web based on traditional enterprise middleware architectural styles that has fallen far short of expectations over the past decade.

— Nick Gall, VP Gartner

Tags: gartner, web-services, soap, wsdl

Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use

2006-12-18T19:01:23+00:00

Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use

An excellent collection.

Tags: apis, web20, web-services

The YDN Python Developer Center

2006-08-08T20:56:26+00:00

I recently had the opportunity to put together the Python Developer Center for the Yahoo! Developer Network. YDN is one of my favourite parts of Yahoo! so I jumped at the chance, and the resulting mini-site is now online (YDN blog post here).

The bulk of the content is the HOWTOs, which discuss ways of accessing Yahoo! APIs using Python:

I had a lot of fun playing around with different ways of accessing the APIs and working out which ones were the most natural fit. The HOWTOs use urllib, urllib2 and xml.dom.minidom from the standard library, but also discuss httplib2, ElementTree and simplejson as third party libraries that are worth investigating. Naturally, feedparser is the recommended tool for accessing Yahoo!'s multitude of RSS feeds.

Python really is a fantastic language for exploring web service APIs. All of the example code for the HOWTOs was first written in an interactive prompt and then copied to a file once it was working. Test-first development is certainly an important technique, but the power of interactive development should never be underestimated.

Tags: python, web-services, ydn

Web APIs, not Web Services

2006-05-26T09:22:57+00:00

In Web Services are Dead, Long Live Web Services, Mark Nottingham suggests HTTP Web Services as a better phrase for discussing machine-to-machine communication using HTTP where the WS-* stack isn't assumed.

I'd go a step further and say that the word "services" is ambiguous and confusing. I've met people who think that a Web Service is any application that you access over the Web - and it's easy to understand their confusion.

I propose Web APIs as a better alternative. They're APIs that you call over the Web. No Deathstar required.

Update: Joe Gregorio argues against the term API in this presentation from last year.

Tags: language, web-services

Using JSON with Yahoo! Web Services

2005-12-15T23:53:17+00:00

Using JSON with Yahoo! Web Services

No more cross-domain script access problems.

Via Jeffrey McManus

Tags: json, web-services, yahoo, ydn

Testing a new version of IXR

2005-05-23T02:58:39+00:00

Almost two years to the day since the last release, I've put together a new version of IXR, my PHP XML-RPC library. I haven't published it on the site just yet as I want to make sure any bugs are ironed out first, but you can grab a copy here:

IXR version 1.7 (beta)

It's mostly a bug fix release, although it also includes some changes made by the WordPress guys who have been maintaining their own fork since January. I've filed a bug asking them to take a look at the new version and maybe roll it in to their codebase.

If you use IXR for anything it would be great if you could run this new version through its paces. Send any bug reports to the usual address.

A big thanks to everyone who sent in bug reports and patches.

Tags: ixr, php, projects, web-services, xml-rpc

Amazon web services

2002-07-17T11:08:19+00:00

Amazon have launched a brand new web service interface to their huge database of products. I've been playing around with it, and I've knocked together a simple search engine example in PHP, with the code available for anyone who wants it. I did a similar thing a few months ago when Google released their Web API so we've set up a new site at Incutio to host these and other open source projects - scripts.incutio.com. The site is only a few hours old and we'd love some feedback - contact us directly or add a comment to this entry.

Tags: amazon, php, projects, web-services