Looking For: A “demo” web web-based application that uses web services

Question

Greetings – I am experimenting with various software techniques to capture and analyze the messages being exchanged between web services, web services that together would form a cloud hosted web application. One of the initial steps is locating a “demo” application to actually experiment against, one that actually consists of and uses a multitude of web services.

Well, finding such has turned out to be harder than I expected. After searching numerous places the initial candidate applications I found did not pan out – each either uses callbacks (such as into Python / GAE libraries) instead of web service invocations, or the source code was not available.

I am seeking recommendations for a web services “demonstration” application:

• That consists of and invokes a multitude of web services (SOAP or REST – or JSON??)
• Has source code available, the “main” application as well invoked web services (so I can tweak the code to instrument the messages being passed around)
• Runs on an available hosting service / engine (such as GAE)

I would prefer (but do not require) Python as the programming language since I have spent the last month learning it, and using it on GAE.

Thanks from this newbie for your contribution!

Steve

Answer 1

The piston add-in for Django is nice. It has sample RESTful web services applications you can run.

http://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/wiki/Home

You might want to use the demo app from the presentation.

http://bitbucket.org/Josh/django-piston-presentation/wiki/Home

Answer 2

I would start with this article

http://www.opensourcetutorials.com/tutorials/Server-Side-Coding/Python/python-soap-libraries/page1.html

We are implementing soap services now, but have decided to pursue a REST approach.

I am trying to implement rest returning JSON and XML right now, and I have been editing a clean and simple python framework for building them.

after much consideration, I have forked a python wsgi library called starlight (my fork is called - twilight)

I have been working on the documentation, and this project is going where you probably want to be.

I will have a demo that returns json and XML in the next couple of days.

http://bitbucket.org/marchon/twilight

Answer 3

I recall using an add-on for turbogears called tgws a few years back but I don't know if it works with the latest turbogears. It was pretty easy to build out web services, but I am not sure it has any demo interfaces. It was even easy to add extra services (like xmlrpc).

Sorry this isn't more helpful but I figured it might give you a place to start. As well, for all I know turbogears 2 or django have stronger support for exposing web services out of the box... (haven't done work on that side for a while).