Check List
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Web2Services Platform
SpiveyWorks
has created a new platform that lets you program directly against the web. You have
complete freedom over the front-end using your domain and development platforms
like PHP, Adobe Flash and Flex, and Microsoft .NET. We provide the powerful
back-end abstractions that let you deal with concepts like Ratings and Comments
using simple standards-based web services and RSS feeds, rather than database
schemas and SQL. We currently offer comments, ratings, and are adding
functionality by the week. Do not worry about database setup, maintenance, and
schema design. Do not worry about data mismatch impedence. You can use .NET
languages like VB and C#, PHP, or Adobe Flex or Flash to call our
standards-based web services or consume an RSS feed of the comments or ratings
in your repositories.
Get Started
Our services only charge as you consume resources. We also offer affordable
packages that scale as your web site scales and takes off. You first need to
sign up
. Then
sign in
. It is free to sign up and for the next month, until September 1, 2008 all of
our offerings are free. After September 1 your comments and ratings repositories
will cost a small amount based on usage. At that time we will accept
PayPal
payments to credit your account.
Starting an Account
After signing up and logging in you will be redirected to your Control Panel
page. This shows you all of your accounts and lets you start new accounts. An
account requires the name of the organization or web site the account is for, a
contact person's name and an email for that contact person. Accounts that you
have already created will show up in the list on the right-half of the Control
Panel page.
Comments and Ratings
The reason you started your account in the first place was to take advantage of
our development platform. Each offering is segmented into collections, otherwise
known as repositories. Comment collections and rating collections are stored
under an account. Navigate to your Control Panel page and select an account and
you will be redirected to that account's page. This is where you can start a new
comment or rating collection. Typically, you will want a new rating or comment
collection for each page you plan to show it on. For example, if your web site
is a Help Web Site for your business product then each page of documentation
will be something you want users to rate. So each page of documentation will
have its own rating collection. Each rating and comment collection has a unique
collection ID and key. It is important that you remember when you submit web
service requests or request a collection's RSS feed, that ID and key ARE
CASE-SENSATIVE. After you start a new rating or comment collection on the
account page you can select the collection from the list to see its details.
These details will provide the collection ID and key.
Submitting to Web Services
After you have gone to your Control Panel page, selected an account and created
a comment or rating collection you will want to submit items to that collection
using web services. The rating web service is available at
Services/RatingWebService.asmx
and the comment web service is available at
Services/CommentWebService.asmx
. If you are calling the web service from an Adobe Flex or Microsoft
Silverlight, or JavaScript application then you will want to use the simple web
method provided in the web service. If you are using PHP or ASP.NET then you can
call the more detailed web method to provide extra details like the user's IP
address and the time it was submitted. To view new comments or ratings that have
been submitted, you will use the RSS feeds. The rating RSS feed is available at
Services/RatingRss.aspx?key=AAAA&collection=AAAA
and the comment RSS feed at
Services/CommentRss.aspx?key=AAAA&collection=AAAA
. You will want to replace the AAAA with your collection's key and ID.
Strategies For Developing Web Apps
Although Web2Services makes it easy to submit ratings and collections using web
services and to view the results using RSS, it is still valuable to call these
services from a web server running PHP or ASP.NET and not directly from your
Rich Internet Application. One reason is to control branding. You will want
users to see their RSS feed coming from your web domain and not from
Web2Services.com. Our RSS feed is for developers to consume, not the end-user.
Second, for performance reasons and cost-efficiency you will want to cache the
RSS feed on your web server and then distribute it to your many users. Right now
Web2Services is free, but when we start charging it will be much more
cost-effective for you to cache RSS feeds once on a regular interval and then
distribute it to your many users.
Pay As You Go
SpiveyWorks will charge users of Web2Services per account by usage. Usage will
be specificly defined by September 1, 2008. Until then, all of Web2Services and
what you use is completely free. We will send an email to account contact
persons closer to September 1, 2008 informing you of payment options for use
after September 1. As one of our payment options, we plan on offering monthly
payments for the prior month's usage through PayPal. If you have specific
questions about the future of pricing please
email us
.
Questions and Feedback
If you have any questions or feedback please contact
customerservice@spiveyworks.com.
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