This seminar will draw on two textbooks this semester.
Web Services: Principles and Technology by Michael P. Papazoglou. Published by Pearson/Prentice Hall. ISBN: 978-0-321-15555-9. This book provides a comprehensive overview of SOAP-based web services and the field of service-oriented architecture (SOA). It will provide us with the background that we need to examine the work going on in "big web services" and serve as a "jumping off point" for looking at the latest work on the Web that is being applied to the WS-* specifications, vendor toolsets, and the like.
RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson & Sam Ruby. Published by O'Reilly. ISBN-13: 978-0-596-52926-0. This books takes a deep look at the "other" approach to web services, known as RESTful web services. REST stands for Representation State Transfer and refers to a concept that appears in Roy Fielding's dissertation. Roy Fielding developed REST while working as a graduate student at U.C. Irvine under the direction of Richard N. Taylor. The RESTful approach to Web services tries to model Web-based services on the techniques that made the Web successful in the first place. This book will also provide us with the background knowledge we need to understand the work being applied to this approach to web services and how REST is being applied to well-known Web application frameworks, such as Ruby On Rails.
With this background, the seminar will endeavor to compare/contrast the two approaches and discuss when/where each technology should be used.
The seminar will also examine Web 2.0 design concepts but no textbook will be used for that portion of the seminar; instead we will draw on materials straight from the Web, including social networking sites, the writings of Tim O'Reilly, blog discussions, and the like.