Latest News from Phil McCarthy

Creating a ColdFusion Web Service

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 17:30:00 EDT

We'll duplicate our PHP Web service in ColdFusion now using XMLRPC.CFC to format our XML response and the CFJSON.cfm for our JSON response. This is the ColdFusion equivalent of the PHP Web service we just looked at. It can be accessed in a REST-like manner through the resources URI and expects two variables in the query string: numbers and output. The variable numbers will contain a delimited list of numbers that this Web service will sum and return. To make our return object more complex, we'll return the original request as well as the sum. You can specify your desired output format by setting output to JSON or XML.

AJAX in a SOA

Wed, 16 May 2007 19:15:00 EDT

A service-oriented architecture isn't much more than a loosely coupled collection of services - often Web services. Services are defined as a unit of work done by a service provider for a service consumer. One of the ways that SOA achieves that loose coupling is by remaining independent of a given technology (such as PHP or ColdFusion) and hiding the details of the implementation - much like a Web service.

Real-World AJAX Book Preview: Advanced Techniques

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 08:00:00 EDT

The great advantage of AJAX clients is that they can communicate back to the server without interrupting what the user is doing. This in turn provides the freedom for AJAX clients to talk back to the server far more frequently than in a traditional page-based Web application. This can be exploited to provide a much richer user experience, for example, by providing real-time data updates, 'live search' functionality, or validating user input on-the-fly.

Real-World AJAX Book Preview: Using TinyAjax to Create Live Search

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 08:00:00 EDT

Using a server-side framework will let you shift some of the processing from the client back to the server. In our example we'll consume our Web service using PHP and print out formatted HTML. AJAX will be used to handle the request and the response, but the Web service will be processed on the server. One benefit to this approach is that you can avoid the issues involved with an AJAX cross-domain request.

Real-World AJAX Book Preview: Creating a Live Search Web Service with PHP

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 08:00:00 EDT

To keep this simple we won't use a database. Instead we'll use an array of values. Create a new file, StateList.php, with the following in it:

Real-World AJAX Book Preview: AJAX Without a Server-side Framework

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 08:00:00 EDT

If you already have AJAX-friendly web services in place, or have a complex site with a framework that's not readily modified, you may find it easier to use a client-side framework like Prototype.js or jQuery. We'll assume that you have AJAX-friendly web services. Let's try an example using our PHP web service to add two numbers.

Real-World AJAX Book Preview: Creating an AJAX-Friendly Web Service

Sun, 22 Apr 2007 08:00:00 EDT

For our example Web services, we'll be loosely adhering to the REST principle and creating Web services that are addressable through the service's Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).

Real-World AJAX Book Preview: Common Server-Side Languages

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 08:00:00 EDT

The beauty of Web services being platform-agnostic is that we can use any language to develop them - although there are features to watch for when choosing a language. While a Web service can return data in any format, the title of this chapter is 'Building AJAX-Friendly Web Services' and our examples will be returning XML or JSON. In keeping with that philosophy we'll look at languages with inherent XML support or a JSON library.

Real-World AJAX Book Preview: Flavors of XML

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 08:00:00 EDT

Earlier we compared formatting payloads in JSON versus XML. One of the chief advantages of sticking with XML is that it can be validated, that is, that disparate systems can independently confirm that a given XML document is well-formed and complies with a particular schema. Schemas can be thought of as contracts that define the elements an XML document should contain and what constraints the elements and their values should be held to. Document Type Definitions (DTDs) are an older schema format that's losing favor among developers because of its lack of support of namespaces. Additionally, its successor, the XML Schema Definition (XSD), is well-formed XML and uses a far richer datatyping system.

Real-World AJAX Book Preview: Building AJAX-Friendly Web Services

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 08:00:00 EDT

When developers first realize what an AJAX client can do, they are often especially excited about its potential in playing the role of the View or even the Controller in the Model-View-Controller (MVC) patterns of application development, with Web services providing the Model layer. If you're unfamiliar with the term, MVC is a paradigm used by software developers to design user interface code (the View) that is decoupled from the data objects it displays (the Model). Rather than letting the View code directly manipulate the Model's data, the MVC pattern introduces a third party known as the Controller.