BCmoney MobileTV

Original Photo courtesy of Magicfantasy on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/manicfantasy/889984960/

I know what you’re thinking, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie right?

Well let me first start off by saying I am not a huge fan of SOAP or anything, in fact, I much prefer REST about 90% of the time. However, there are still some cases where a fully controllable SOAP API which simply lists results as XML wrapped in a SOAP envelope, is a better way of interacting with data; particularly when that data is updated less frequently and is larger in size. Seeing Google results as XML can make them easier to manipulate and exchange, oh and lets not forget, that XML is what the X in AJAX stands for anyway, though JSON is used interchangeably these days, if not more often. With the debate between the SOAP and RESTful crowd all but won by REST and its simplicity, lets go ahead and awake the sleeping dinosaur that is the Google Search SOAP API for experimentation’s sake. For a quick history lesson, in 2006 the headlines rang to the predictable tune of “Google Drops the SOAP“, which Google eventually responded to by effectively saying “move on” and former managers for Google’s SOAP APIs came out and explained Why SOAP sucks.

In choosing between web scrapping and using the new Search API, I’ve opted to go for the more advisable Search API approach. The wrapper code for the Google AJAX Search API was done in PHP, using a simple client/server implementation, and referring to an old archive of the SOAP API’s WSDL here:
http://bcmoney-mobiletv.com/widgets/google/GoogleSearch.wsdl (here’s a sample SOAP request)
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