However, in the end it makes more sense to use the Java
solutions to get hold of the stability and reliability of these implementations.
Web services have been a staple of the enterprise world for a long time. With the appearance
of the REST protocols, some of this has changed, but there are still many SOAP services in the
world. For a long time, the S in SOAP meant ???simple,??? but this has now changed. Working with
the whole web service stack can be extremely complicated without the right tools to help. I won??™t
take the WS-* approach too far in this chapter; I??™ll just look at what you need to do to get started
with web services that are exposed on the Internet. If you want to create your own web service,
you??™re probably better off using REST, and Rails has extremely good support for REST. A sidebar
about REST is included at the end of the chapter, but that is all I??™ll say about REST in this book,
because nice documentation of Rails and REST exists in other places.
Like the description of XML libraries earlier, we??™ll develop standalone programs in this
chapter, and generalize into a library that can be dumped into a Rails application later. The
web service chosen as an example is Amazon Web Services (AWS). This has both advantages
and drawbacks; it??™s a mature system with an incredible amount of operations (but we??™ll only
use a small subset in this chapter). It??™s available for free as a developer service, and it??™s a useful
service.
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