Interfacing with web services - advice needed

[Devin Asay]

Graham,

Here are some links to notes I use in my class for introducing students to the concept of web services in general and for how to access them in LiveCode. They’re written assuming no prior knowledge of web services. You may find something of interest.

Intro to Web Services Lesson Outline: http://livecode.byu.edu/internet/webServicesintro.php

Connecting to Web Services in LC: http://livecode.byu.edu/internet/webServices.php

Implementing a RESTful web service using GET—a case study: http://livecode.byu.edu/internet/getMethodSteps.php

Finally a couple of BRIEF intros to JSON and XML formatted data:
http://livecode.byu.edu/internet/json_intro.php
http://livecode.byu.edu/internet/intro_xml.php

HTH

Devin

On Mar 16, 2015, at 11:37 AM, Graham Samuel <livfoss at mac.com> wrote:

> I’ve been bothering this list about XML and arrays, for a geography project I’m pursuing. I’m making progress. However, I’ve now come up against a new issue which isn’t about LiveCode as such but which raises a fairly general question, i.e.
> 
> I need to do a calculation (see the end of this mail if you want to know my current need) - the calculation is a tricky algorithm which is in the public domain and which relies on possibly large data sets which are also in the public domain. I want to avoid coding the algorithm in LiveCode - or any other language for that matter. 
> 
> If I wanted to do this calculation personally as a one-off, I would go to one of a number of web sites that provide the calculation as a service, put in my parameters and read off the result. Simple. Now I want to do the same thing repetitively from within a LiveCode program. So I need a way to ’talk’ to one of these web sites as if I was keying information in and reading it out - I’m not expecting any special privileges like being given an more machine-oriented API to work with. So the question is, how would I go about coding this type of interaction? Has anyone done this recently? Are there any tutorials? I must say I find it very daunting, and would love to be told "it’s really quite easy”. Could be widget material, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
> 
> Here’s hoping
> 
> Graham
> 
> For those who want to know, my current case involves a succession of points on the Earth’s surface where I know each one's longitude and latitude: I want to convert the intervals between these points to distances in metres (say). This is a known problem, and AFAIK involves converting longitude and latitude to UTM. Several academic and other web sites offer services. Once one has the points in metres from some two-dimensional datum, it’s easy to calculate distances. All the GPS-display systems do it, usually imposing the route on a commercially available map and calculating how far you’ve travelled etc.
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Devin Asay
Office of Digital Humanities
Brigham Young University