Web services

For the purpose of my work, I also have to look into web services. I have to admit, that while I've looked at quite a couple of technologies, I have not actually set up a web service before. I will attempt to, but first I gotta learn more about it. So here's some definitions taken from all over.

As taken from the W3C Working Group

[Definition: A Web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards.]

As taken from wikipedia

The W3C Web service definition encompasses many different systems, but in common usage the term refers to clients and servers that communicate using XML messages that follow the SOAP standard. In such systems, there is often machine-readable description of the operations offered by the service written in the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). The latter is not a requirement of a SOAP endpoint, but it is a prerequisite for automated client-side code generation in many Java and .NET SOAP frameworks (frameworks such as Spring, Apache Axis2 and Apache CXF being notable exceptions). Some industry organizations, such as the WS-I, mandate both SOAP and WSDL in their definition of a Web service.

More recently, RESTful Web services have been regaining popularity. These also meet the W3C definition, and are often better integrated with HTTP than SOAP-based services. They do not require XML messages or WSDL service-API definitions.

Google maps

ahh, finally, I am made to work with google maps. Should be interesting, just that with other stuffs going on, never found the time. So here I shall start my little own documentation on how I'm progressing with the google map app thingy.

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/

PIL

Some of my students had problems installing PIL with python on their windows XP. Something about python being compiled by a VS compiler. Anyway, managed to resolve the issue by downgrading to python 2.4 and using PIL 2.4 as well.

Useless?

Just found this website while looking around resources for python. It's pretty funny, and kind of useful in my opinion! Check it out useless python

Python

ahh so I've gotten lazy in updating this blog, but nvm I can start again!

Regarding Django, I've found it relatively easy to use. And of course, once one gets the hang of it, it is easier, but when you are just starting to learn it, the learning curve can take a while. Perhaps it is because I was also not familiar with python then.

For work reasons, I have to be familiar with python now, so anyway I helped a friend out to parse some stuff out from the web. Had intended to use perl as I really like perl's regex, but thought I might as well try python to finally know how to use it :p Anyway, I found this neat little tool pyparsing and also learnt more about python's regex.

I still prefer perl's regex..... or maybe cos I've been using it for so long so I'm biased. But anyway nvm, I need to learn to like python... for a few months at least hahaha