Web Services and Applications

The purpose of this page is to provide support information for the XML Web Services and web applications trade books written by Dr. Paul A. Watters.

The two books I have written in this area are Web Services in Finance and WebGuru Guide to JavaScript, co-authored with Bill Stanek. These books lie at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of web technology - one is concerned with the backend integration of large and complex systems to provide services, while the other is concerned with thin client programming for web applications.

I wrote Web Services in Finance to lay out design goals and approaches for building robust Web Services applications, using mature technologies, using the fast-moving, real-time world of finance systems as an example. The book is not a study of how financial systems operate today, but how they might work tomorrow.

The WebGuru Guide to JavaScript, on the other hand, was designed for non-programmers (web designers, graphic artists etc) to be able to write simple, clear programs in JavaScript for websites. Personally, I think there is nothing worse than seeing over-complex, spaghetti-code JavaScripts copied and pasted across may websites, when some simple programming would solve many of the common problems encountered in client applications (such as form validation).

Microsoft and Sun provide some very useful resources for developing XML Web Services, and you can even use the existing services provided by Amazon and Google to build your own distributed applications.