October 14, 2005

First Production Web Service

Sometimes a web application developer learns a new skill, but can't find a decent application to use it in. I learned about publishing web services some time ago, but never had an outlet to use the technique.
Today I am launching my first production web service. If you go to my company's site at www.cambriaUSA.com, you can enter your zip code from the consumer web page and get a list of retail outlets that carry Cambria Surfaces. You can only do this from our site though. Now with the web service I created, anybody can do it from any site, provided they know how. (They would find out how from me of course.)

Example: This link takes you to an example, it is on one of our web servers, but a completely different web server than the one that our main web site is on. The few lines of code on this page could be copied to almost any site, and the result would be the same. The table that you see is just a dump of the data, there is no formatting or HTML - displaying the data is up to the consumer of the service.

I think its cool, other developers will think it is cool. You might not. Thought I'd share it anyway. Its one of those things that makes my job fun. :)

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