Fun With Web services!

By David Ramel

August 16, 2004 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - Sure, Web services can enhance business processes and facilitate business-to-business transactions and all that stuff. But hey, they can do a lot more than that. Here are some creative, useful (and perhaps semiuseful) utilities that show the wide range of their capabilities. Keep in mind when using these services that many of them return the results in XML-formatted text, but you can read between the XML tags to get the pertinent information.

SERVICE: Random Quotes

PROVIDER: SeshaKiran.com

DESCRIPTION: Provides random quotes from people such as John F. Kennedy, Henry David Thoreau, Albert Einstein and others. Perfect for that inspirational midafternoon pick-me-up.

The WSDL service description can be found here.

SERVICE: Spell Checker

PROVIDER: CDYNE.com

DESCRIPTION: This service provides a text box in which you can type or copy text to be spell-checked at the press of a button. It then flags misspelled words, provides possible substitutions and makes corrections. And to think we actually pay people to do that here at Computerworld!

The WSDL service description can be found here.

SERVICE: CurrencyConvertor

PROVIDER: WebServiceX.net

DESCRIPTION: Get conversion rates from one currency to another. It lists a stunning 151 currencies. This site is quite useful when planning your vacation and you wonder how many Sao Tome dobras you can get for your Malawi kwacha (that would be 79.5636 the other day, but it has probably changed, what with the notoriously wild financial fluctuations in the Sao Tome economy).

The WSDL service description can be found here.

SERVICE: Shakespeare

PROVIDER: XML Me.com

DESCRIPTION: This service lets you input a phrase from one of Shakespeare's plays, and it then displays the speech, speaker and play. The host site provides a list of sample phrases to use in testing, but apparently you can use just about any phrase ever penned by the prolific bard.

The WSDL service description can be found here.

SERVICE: Weather Report
PROVIDER: EJSE.com
DESCRIPTION: This gives you an instant weather check for any ZIP code. It provides temperature, "feels like" temperature, forecast, visibility, barometric pressure, dew point, UV index, humidity and wind. Perfect for kicking yourself for passing up that vacation to Sao Tome.

Related weather services from this provider can be found here

The WSDL service description can be found here.

SERVICE: SiteSafe

PROVIDER: Sharptooth.ws

DESCRIPTION: Wondering if that Web site is safe for the kids? SiteSafe's ReviewWebPage service operation analyzes all of the words in a given Web page, and looks for words in two categories: Category 1 words are mildly derogatory, and/or colloquial speech. Category 2 words are extremely rude and/or offensive (includes all words relating to sex, drugs and drug abuse, and socially unacceptable personal insults). SiteSafe then calculates a suitable rating for the Web page, based on its word content. A Web page will receive one of three possible ratings: Safe, Almost Safe or Unsafe.

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