Wiley Professional Web APIs with PHP: eBay, Google, Paypal, Amazon, FedEx plus Web Feeds 978-0-7645-8954-6 Manuale Utente

Introducing Web Ser vices

I imagine you picked up this book for a reason.

Perhaps you’ve built a fantastic website for your organization, but now that it’s done, you want
more: more ways to view the information, more ways to alter the information, more ways to share
the information. Web services can help.

Maybe you run a small business through eBay and want better ways to manage the items you are
selling. Web services can help.

You could be a student, a teacher, or an institution wanting to leverage the vast wealth of informa-
tion compiled by Google. Web services can help.

Web services can help you use the information on the Web in new ways, from simply allowing
someone to subscribe to pockets of information so that they can be immediately notified when
new information is available, to creating complex business applications that can manage complex
real-time supply chains.

Before digging in to how to use web services in the following chapters, this chapter presents you
with the following:

❑

What web services are

❑

Why web services are used

❑

How web services work

❑

Who uses web services

❑

And finally, why you should use web services

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