Teaching Tip: Consuming Web Services: A Yahoo! Newsfeed Reader

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) shows demonstrable signs of simplifying software integration. It provides the necessary framework for building applications that can be integrated and can reduce the cost of integration significantly. Organizations are beginning to architect new integration solutions following the SOA approach. As such, information systems (IS) curricula must introduce students to SOA and Web Services as early as possible. This paper presents an ideal opportunity to expose IS students to SOA as soon as they are introduced to the basics of HTML and programming. The application developed by students, a Yahoo! newsfeed reader, running as a client-side application, has the additional benefit of only requiring the Internet Explorer. A JavaScript translation and an implementation of the application in classic Active Server Pages (ASP) for server-side execution are also presented.