This is the home page of the Book Info sample web service, a service that provides a lookup service for Books. For example, pass in an ISBN number, and you will get all the relevant information for that book, including title, author, publisher, and even a list of prices at popular online booksellers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, WHSmith.co.uk). Or, pass in a keyword, and the service will return an array of ISBNs that match that keyword. (Note - omit dashes in the ISBN).
The web service itself is implemented in C# and ASP.NET and is running right now on this server. It basically screen-scrapes information from existing HTML-forms based websites. For this reason, every time B&N or Amazon change their page layouts, this service is likely to break. This service was designed and constructed before Amazon published a web services interface into their data, but the logic has since been modified to use the Amazon web services.
This page includes links to source code of the server implementation, and client implementations in C# and Java. Also there is a working client ASPX page that consumes the web service.
Any particularly motivated people that write their own sample clients for this service are encouraged to upload them to xmethods (See link below).
Last Updated: Wednesday, 16 October 2003