discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

[Nathan Yergler <nathan AT yergler.net>]

As you may remember we launched CC Web Services a few months ago.  Since 
then they've primarily been used as a platform for providing licensing 
services to ccPublisher.  While we initially committed to providing both 
SOAP and REST-ful interfaces to the web services, several implementation 
details delayed the completion of the SOAP server.  At the time we 
decided to delay rolling out SOAP support until we (ok, I) had the 
bandwidth to complete the implementation.

Its become apparent over the past month that that time is not coming 
soon.  We've also received only one inquiry regarding the SOAP interface 
since launching the web services.  As a result, we've decided to 
deprecate the SOAP interface and move towards supporting REST as our 
primary web services platform.  Deprecated may be too weak a word -- 
they never really worked completely to start with, so there's not much 
there to deprecate.

You can read basic documentation on the CC web services at 
http://api.creativecommons.org.  We have also implemented a Java wrapper 
as a demonstration of using the REST service from Java.  You can find 
more about the demo at 
http://yergler.net/blog/archives/2005/02/08/using-java-with-cc-web-services.  
You can find the JavaDoc for the web services wrapper class at 
http://api.creativecommons.org/doc/java.  It's currently a little slim, 
but I'm working on bringing it up to speed.

Finally, we're also starting to think about moving the CC web services 
from "beta" to "1.0" and commit to providing some API stability. If 
anyone has feedback on how they believe the web services could be 
improved or made more useful, please let us know.

Thanks,

Nathan R. Yergler
Software Engineer
Creative Commons