One of the features of StrikeIron's IronCloud platform is that it can accept invocations of Web services via multiple protocols including both SOAP and REST. This maximizes the audience of potential users and provides for a good deal of flexibility with multiple IDEs, coding styles, and platform implementations.
In addition to the support for SOAP calls within the platform (including SOAP Headers, SOAP parameter-based authentication, and SOAP w/ HTTP Secure) there is also support for accepting REST calls. This is achieved within the “Transformation” sub-system of our IronCloud platform, meaning we translate the REST call to its equivalent SOAP call before hitting the actual Web service living within our data centers, and then translate the response back to the REST format before it is sent back to the calling entity, and of course all within milliseconds.
This is powerful because it allows any of our services to be integrated into Web scripting languages and other places where a REST call might be more appropriate or convenient, and opens up the functionality to Web developers who can quickly put this concept to use. These REST calls for example can easily be used within PHP, Python, Ruby, ColdFusion, JavaScript, Perl and even embedded into Java, .NET, and other IDE platforms, including anything that can utilize Representational State Transfer (REST). In other words, REST provides a nice interface for easy leveraging of functionality out in the Cloud.
Here is an example using REST with our North American Address Verification service, a Web API that validates the existence of any address in the United States or Canada, and then standardizes the address according to postal standards (as well as appending additional data such as county and latitude/longitude coordinates). The example below can be entered into any Web browser address line as-is (with the appropriate authentication - click the Free Trials button to the right or contact StrikeIron to get access) in order to get a response. You can then change parameter values for different addresses to get the different corresponding responses. You can also try other methods within any of our Web services following the same form (you have to change the parameters to match the method of course).
Form:
http://ws.strikeiron.com/NAAddressVerification6/NorthAmericanAddressVerificationService/NorthAmericanAddressVerification?LicenseInfo.RegisteredUser.UserID=[UserID]&LicenseInfo.RegisteredUser.Password=[Password]&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.AddressLine1=[AddressLine1]&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.AddressLine2=[AddressLine2]&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.CityStateOrProvinceZIPOrPostalCode=[CityStateZip]&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.Country=[Country]&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.Casing=[Casing]
Example:
http://ws.strikeiron.com/NAAddressVerification6/NorthAmericanAddressVerificationService/NorthAmericanAddressVerification?LicenseInfo.RegisteredUser.UserID=***********&LicenseInfo.RegisteredUser.Password=******&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.AddressLine1=15501 Weston Parkway&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.AddressLine2=&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.CityStateOrProvinceZIPOrPostalCode=Cary NC&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.Country=US&NorthAmericanAddressVerification.Casing=UPPER
Because a REST call contains parameters including UserID and Password, we of course recommend to our users that these parameters be stored in a non-viewable config file and not the actual Web page source, or some other means of hiding credentials (within non-viewable code or within a database for example).
Have a REST-related question? Contact us at support@strikeiron.com Like a free trial? Contact us at info@strikeiron.com
When Oracle releases version 7.1 of its NetBeans IDE, 8 different StrikeIron Web Services APIs will be pre-integrated into the development environment. This makes it easy to build applications that leverage StrikeIron functionality and its real-time data sources. All of the underlying data sources are updated and maintained within StrikeIron's data center utilizing its IronCloud platform. Since the interfaces, behavior, and data structures are the same across all of StrikeIron's APIs, it makes it very easy to build sophisticated applications that leverage these external data sources, and without the corresponding cost traditionally associated with procuring, updating, and maintaining these data sources internally.
The 8 services to be included are:
Email Verification
Foreign Currency Exchange Rates (160 currencies updated every 30 minutes)
North American (US & Canada) Address Verification (CASS & SERP)
Global Address Verification (240+ countries)
IP Address Lookup
Reverse Phone Lookup
SMS Text Message Alerts (Supports 600 carriers in 60+ countries)
Sales and Use Tax Rates Complete (US & Canada)
Using the IDE, these Web services can easily be integrated into Web applications, business processes, Websites, and enterprise software applications, and anywhere else where SOAP-based Web services can be consumed.
The NetBeans IDE, acquired by Oracle as part of the Sun transaction, is downloaded over 550,000 times per month, and in use by over 900,000 developers according to Oracle. The IDE is a free, open-source development environment enabling the creation of desktop, enterprise, Web, and mobile applications with the Java platform, as well as with C/C++, PHP, JavaScript and Groovy. It includes language support for development to the Java SE 7 specification with the JDK 7 language features, support for GlassFish 3.1, Oracle WebLogic, Oracle Database, Maven 3, HTML 5 and more.
Version 7.1 including the integration will be released soon. The nightly development build of the NetBeans IDE 7.1 that includes these services can however be downloaded and installed now from here: http://bits.netbeans.org/download/trunk/nightly/
2011 has been the year of the Cloud database. The idea of shared database resources and the abstraction of underlying hardware seems to be catching on. Just like Web and application servers, paying-as-you-go and eliminating unused database resources, licenses, hardware, and all of the associated cost is proving to have attractive enough business models that the major vendors are betting on it in significant ways.
The recent excitement has not been limited to just the fanfare around "big data" technologies. Lately, most of the major announcements have come around the traditional relational, table-driven SQL environments Web applications make use of much more widely than the key-value pair data storage mechanisms "NoSQL" technology uses for Web-scale data-intensive applications such as Facebook, NetFlix, etc.
Here are some of the new Cloud database offerings for 2011:
Saleforce.com has launched Database.com, enabling developers in other Cloud server environments such as Amazon's EC2 and the Google App Engine to utilize its database resources, not just users of Salesforce's CRM and Force.com platforms. You can also build applications in PHP or on the Android platform and utilize Database.com resources. The idea is to reach a broader set of developers and application types than just CRM-centric applications.
At Oracle Open World a couple of weeks ago, Oracle announced the Oracle Database Cloud Service, a hosted database offering running Oracle's 11gR2 database platform available in a monthly subscription model, accessible either via JDBC or its own REST API.
Earlier this month, Google announced Google Cloud SQL, a database service that will be available as part of its App Engine offering based on MySQL, complete with a Web-based administration panel.
Amazon, to complement its other Cloud services and highly used EC2 infrastructure, has made the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) available to enable SQL capabilities from Cloud applications, giving you a choice of underlying database technology to use such as MySQL or Oracle. It is currently in beta.
Microsoft also has its SQL Azure Cloud Database offering available in the Cloud, generally positioned as suited for applications that use the Microsoft stack for developers that will want to leverage some of the benefits of the Cloud.
"Marketecture?"
Some of the above offerings have only been announced so far, and not actually launched. Or, they have limited preview access available now. Also, even the business models in some of these cases have not even been completely divulged, or if so are very likely to change.
Clearly there is a considerable marketshare land grab existing now. All of the major vendors are recognizing that traditional-SQL Cloud storage infrastructure will be an important technology going forward. Adding a solid database layer to the Cloud architecture story seems like an important step in the continuing enterprise and commercial software move to the Cloud, and these new vendor offerings should in turn accelerate this move.
Latency?
So, is this really the wave of the future? Some of the major questions that will have to be answered include those around latency. When data requests have to hop from a client application, then to the application server, to the database, and then back to the server and client, even multiple times within a single request, it can result in quite a performance hit. Likely, these machines exist far from each other geographically and might really slow things done, annoying an end-user with the slow page loads. This is probably why most infrastructure providers realize that they have to have the corresponding database capabilities available and accessed natively to reduce this latency. However, performance, along with security issues (perceived or otherwise) still could be a significant barrier to mainstream adoption.
Also, most of the relational database environments that exist in the Cloud only have a subset of SQL capabilities available and in some cases can be quite limited. For example, many of these Cloud SQL platforms don't support cross-table joins, at least not yet. This is a very common requirement for SQL applications. The lack of support is primarily because joins can consume a lot of resources, another performance-killer in shared environments.
Next?
Once most of this storage and Cloud database infrastructure gets in place however, incorporating more content-oriented data services such as customer data verification will become commonplace and easy to leverage. We may even see them incorporated into the database offerings themselves as they look to differentiate themselves from vendor to vendor. Cloud-based database offerings have the advantage of making much larger libraries of data-oriented add-on capabilities available right out of the box, so the story here is much more than just cost.
While SQL Cloud offering announcements are all the rage in 2011, 2012 will undoubtedly tell the adoption tale. No doubt these offerings will be ideal and cost-effective for many use cases out there. But will demand be large enough quickly enough to support all of these vendors and drive the innovation at a speed that will make these platforms viable in the near future for enterprise and commercial applications? The answer is likely yes, but the next twelve months or so will give us a lot of the supporting data to measure the extent of the trend.
