OrangeFlash

I’ve just opened small site, with my humble collection of libriaries. - framework.orangeflash.eu. Currently you can find there:

• XML RPC: Allows you work with XML RPC API on server, for example you can work with blogs.
• WordPress: WordPress API, build on XML RPC API, for WordPress based blogs.
• Yahoo: Wrapper for original YahooSearchAPI, that allows more comfortable work, alogn with MXML component

Note: I didn’t make examples yet :)

This is first tutorial in a series of “Creating NanoRIA”, in these tutoriales we will discuss creation of Web Service and small range of client. Today we’ll talk about server-side, than in the next tutorials we’ll create WPF client, Flex and Flash Lite clients, so potential end-users will be able to run our app on: Windows, Mac OS, Brew, SymbianOS and WindowsMobile.

Introduction

Lets pretend that we work for some company, and they want widely accessible application (Macs, Windows, Mobile devices etc.) which will let users to get access to news, some media data (photos), and weather information. Of course we won’t create that big stuff, we’ll emulate these functions, we will read news from EuroNews.net and BBC.com, then we pull some images from Flickr.com and weather from webservicex.net, but we still can pretend ;).

For this tutorial you’ll need:

• RSS.NET framework for parsing RSS feeds.
• FlickrNET framework for working with Flickr.com.
• Microsoft WebDeveloper Express for developing and testing our work.
• Web Services (similar tutorial with some info can be found in this blog .NET+Flex).
• And some knowledge of C# (you can read this and this entries in my blog or review documentation of WebDeveloper).
• And Flickr.com developer API key, which you can get after registration via your profile

Planning

Ok so we’ve agreed that we pretend that we own Flickr, BBC and Euronews (cool isn’t it? :D), lets see what we have.

We have:

• BBC World RSS feed
• EuroNews RSS feed
• Bunch of Flickr methods (but we will use only one)
• And WebServiceX.net WebService which provides us with thcurrent weather.

Quite nice, so we have to make these data avaliable in appropriate form for users, for news I suggest that we gather em all in one place, and than sort them by date, and since downloading a lot of news could be a problem for mobile users, we have to define two ways of getting news: for desktop computers and for mobile users. Then we will pass bunch of links to flickr photos, and information about current weather.

In order to do this, we will create a series of Value Objects (also known as DTO), which will be sent by our server to client.

Our Web Service will have 4 methods:

• GetNews - Retrieving latest news.
• GetNewsLite - Same but for mobiles.
• GetPhotos - Photos from flickr
• GetWeather - Weather.

Let’s start.
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Yesterday I wrote about Yahoo Flash Developer Center, and posted simple example example with web search using Yahoo API, now I present Yahoo Spell Checker, source files avaliable here

This works slowly, but I have an idea. This application should have some kind of local dictionary, which would filter words for checking, for example “I”, “the”, “hello”, “flash” and other commonly used words should not be checked, this should speed up the proccess.

Yahoo lunched Flash Developer Center.

With Search API we can:

• Use ussual web search
• Image search
• context search
• news search
• term extraction
• local search
• spelling suggestions
• and related suggestions

Here is very simple example of web search

For this tutorial you will need:

Adobe Flex Builder
Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express

Also need to know what is WSDL, SOAP (you can read about them at http://www.wikipedia.org).

Part I: Creating of the Web Service in Visual Web Developer Express

To be honest I love this programm, this programm designed especialy for lazy guys like me, we dont need to install, setup, download different parts and plugins, register or do other actions to test your projects. This programm will do everything for you :D. This is just the right thing we need for my newbie level of WebService developing.

We will create service which should give us rates for the Adobi, Applo and Mecrosoft shares (we will generate them of course). For this purpose we will create OrangeStocks class, which will be WebService itself, and StockData class, which should “collect” data about rates.
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