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Providing Web Services: Moving Away From Place
During the early years of the Web, before content had semantic meaning, sites were developed as a collection of “pages.” Sites in the 1990s were usually either brochure-ware (static HTML pages with insipid content) or they were interactive in a flashy, animated, JavaScript kind of way. In that era, a common method of promoting sites was to market them as “places”—the Web as a virtual world complete with online shopping malls and portals.
In the late 90s and especially the first few years of the 21st century, the advent of XML technologies and Web services began to change how sites were designed. XML technologies enabled content to be shareable and transformable between different systems, and Web services provided hooks into the innards of sites. Instead of visual design being the interface to content, Web services have become programmatic interfaces to that same content. This is truly powerful. Anyone can build an interface to content on any domain if the developers there provide a Web services API.
Two great examples of the shift away from place to services on the Web are Amazon.com and eBay, both of which provide an immense amount of commercial data in the form of Web services, accessible to any developer who wants it. An interesting interface built using eBay’s Web services is Andale, a site that tracks sales and prices to give auction sellers a better idea of what items are hot and how much they’ve been selling for.
source : digital web magazine
During the early years of the Web, before content had semantic meaning, sites were developed as a collection of “pages.” Sites in the 1990s were usually either brochure-ware (static HTML pages with insipid content) or they were interactive in a flashy, animated, JavaScript kind of way. In that era, a common method of promoting sites was to market them as “places”—the Web as a virtual world complete with online shopping malls and portals.
In the late 90s and especially the first few years of the 21st century, the advent of XML technologies and Web services began to change how sites were designed. XML technologies enabled content to be shareable and transformable between different systems, and Web services provided hooks into the innards of sites. Instead of visual design being the interface to content, Web services have become programmatic interfaces to that same content. This is truly powerful. Anyone can build an interface to content on any domain if the developers there provide a Web services API.
Two great examples of the shift away from place to services on the Web are Amazon.com and eBay, both of which provide an immense amount of commercial data in the form of Web services, accessible to any developer who wants it. An interesting interface built using eBay’s Web services is Andale, a site that tracks sales and prices to give auction sellers a better idea of what items are hot and how much they’ve been selling for.
source : digital web magazine
Labels:
TECHNOLOGY
at
10:17 PM
Crawling robot reveals how fish evolved
The first animal to crawl onto land from the ocean probably looked a bit like today's salamander, and researchers have wondered how it was able to switch from swimming to walking. Now, European scientists have built a robot with a primitive electric nervous system that they say mimics that change in motion. The robot doesn't look much like a salamander it's nearly a yard long and made of nine bright yellow plastic segments each containing a battery and microcontroller but it does seem to move like one. The scientists chose the amphibious salamander as a model because the animal more closely resembles the first land-dwelling vertebrates. The point was to understand how a spinal cord developed to direct a swimming motion that could handle the different coordination needed between a body and its limbs for walking, according to the team led by Auke Jan Ijspeert of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne, Switzerland. So they first designed a basic nervous system modelled on that of the lamprey, a long, primitive eel-like fish. Then that design was modified to show how it could evolve into a nervous system that also could control walking. And to prove their point, they built the salamander robot which walks across floors, down the beach and even manages to swim in Lake Geneva. Its swimming motion uses undulations like the lamprey, while on land the robot uses a slow stepping gait with diagonally opposed limbs moving together while the body forms an S-shape. The work, the researchers reported on Friday in the journal Science, is "a demonstration of how robots can be used to test biological models, and in return, how biology can help in designing robot locomotion controllers." Studies of the robot show that our fishy ancestors likely used their primitive brains to make the evolutionary leap from water worlds to terra firma. The research was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the French Ministry for Research and Technology.
SOURCE : THE TIMES OF INDIA
The first animal to crawl onto land from the ocean probably looked a bit like today's salamander, and researchers have wondered how it was able to switch from swimming to walking. Now, European scientists have built a robot with a primitive electric nervous system that they say mimics that change in motion. The robot doesn't look much like a salamander it's nearly a yard long and made of nine bright yellow plastic segments each containing a battery and microcontroller but it does seem to move like one. The scientists chose the amphibious salamander as a model because the animal more closely resembles the first land-dwelling vertebrates. The point was to understand how a spinal cord developed to direct a swimming motion that could handle the different coordination needed between a body and its limbs for walking, according to the team led by Auke Jan Ijspeert of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne, Switzerland. So they first designed a basic nervous system modelled on that of the lamprey, a long, primitive eel-like fish. Then that design was modified to show how it could evolve into a nervous system that also could control walking. And to prove their point, they built the salamander robot which walks across floors, down the beach and even manages to swim in Lake Geneva. Its swimming motion uses undulations like the lamprey, while on land the robot uses a slow stepping gait with diagonally opposed limbs moving together while the body forms an S-shape. The work, the researchers reported on Friday in the journal Science, is "a demonstration of how robots can be used to test biological models, and in return, how biology can help in designing robot locomotion controllers." Studies of the robot show that our fishy ancestors likely used their primitive brains to make the evolutionary leap from water worlds to terra firma. The research was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the French Ministry for Research and Technology.
SOURCE : THE TIMES OF INDIA
Labels:
SCIENCE,
TECHNOLOGY
at
2:29 AM
