Some miscellaneous comments on this solution and Web services:
Web services work regardless of the programming language. This example used Ruby on Rails, but it also works with other languages and frameworks.
This solution lacks a plan for what to do when the USPS Web service isn’t available. Maybe a local cache can help minimize the impact of an outage.
The parsing of the XML response from the Web service is probably the least elegant code written. Maybe a template can help this area of the solution.
Why bother the user with entering a city and state when it’s possible to look them up with just a ZIP code?
How effective are these various working groups that bequeath Web service standards into the marketplace?
Has anybody ever thought for one second about implementing the Universal Description Discovery Integration (UDDI) standard?
Are Web service standards too complex? Can developers wade through all the acronyms?
Rarely does the marketplace declare only one winner. Many competitors advance to the next round. But the marketplace seems quite efficient at weeding out the losers.
How long until the naysayers question RoR’s performance, security, or production worthiness?
The marketing muscle of many big companies is clouding the Web service waters, and this article
addressed a common problem with a simple and easily understood Web service. The people at the
United States Postal Service have implemented a solid and very useful Web Service. Jakarta Struts
was a vast improvement over previous efforts to address Web application frameworks—to address
the whole model view controller (MVC) stack. Ruby on Rails is, at least, a significant improvement
over Struts.
