Web & System Integration 
Get Lazy with Public Web Services
They say good programmers are lazy. And you know what? I agree! Not lazy in the dictionary sense of "not wanting to work" but rather as Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl, put it: "The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure."
If I write a program that solves an important problem, then document it, ensure it is always available and then offer it for free, wouldn't you want to use it?
Up until recently this was really hard to do. Unless you knew me, my programming practices, and had hooks into my runtime environment, chances were it would never happen.
Then came Web Services and everything changed. Today, if you have a problem, there is likely an available solution that is coded, documented, deployed and immediately usable.
This changes the paradigm for programmers. Instead of building monolithic applications from scratch, we can now write loosely coupled integrations that draw on the strengths of pre-existing available components.
At Angel we're taking full advantage of Web Services to enable rapid voice application development. That's why each Voice Page comes with a pre-configured voice interface and why there's a template library of sample applications at your disposal.
This month I encourage you to take a look at Public Web Services. They're freely or cheaply available, and you can call on them from your Voice Sites using simple scripts. These services are typically free or relatively cheap, and you can call on them from your Voice Sites using simple scripts.
A good place to start is public directories (e.g. StrikeIron, WebServiceX, XMethods). These directories offer compilations ranging from the trivial (Odd Fact Generator) to some highly useful services such as:
- Sales Tax Rates - given a ZIP code, find the applicable tax rates. Useful for voice commerce applications.
- SMS Gateway - given a phone number, enables you to send a short text message to the device. Useful for community / alert applications.
- FedEx / UPS Package Tracker - given a package number, finds its shipping status. Useful for customer service applications / commerce / retailers.
- Validate Routing Number - if you want to take e-check payments, you can use this web service to ensure that the caller entered the right routing number for his/her bank institution.
- Reverse Phone Lookup - given a CallerID, find their name and address. (We offer a commercial-grade solution for this through our partners at 411XML; we'll be happy to give you a quote)
Using your own smarts, the Site Builder tool, and Public Web Services I am sure you can pull off some pretty impressive tricks in no time. Because good programmers are lazy! ;-)
If you have a web services IVR project in mind, we'd love to talk to you! Give us a call at 888-692-6435 and say "Developer Hotline".
Sam Aparicio
