Your basic search-engine query -- nothing new, really, except for the f=xml. That I would take to be a promise that they won't go changing either the query terms or the XML schema (though they could easily and compatibly add to either of them).
This stability is what makes it an API, not so much the XML; they could return comma-delimited text or even HTML; what counts is that it's documented and stable.
SOAP is a red herring: if you change your SOAP schema every two weeks you don't have a web service API that anyone can use. Keep your search terms and results stable and you indeed have a web service people can rely on.
I've been doing some server-side stuff recently that relies heavily on consistently-formatted URL's and returns plain text that's easy to parse in Perl. Works great and it's trivial to debug.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
f=xml. That I would take to be a promise that they won't go changing either the query terms or the XML schema (though they could easily and compatibly add to either of them).This stability is what makes it an API, not so much the XML; they could return comma-delimited text or even HTML; what counts is that it's documented and stable.
SOAP is a red herring: if you change your SOAP schema every two weeks you don't have a web service API that anyone can use. Keep your search terms and results stable and you indeed have a web service people can rely on.
I've been doing some server-side stuff recently that relies heavily on consistently-formatted URL's and returns plain text that's easy to parse in Perl. Works great and it's trivial to debug.
(no subject)