A web service is nothing more than a formal way to surf the web with another piece of software rather than you just using a mouse and a browser to access sites. The advantage of a web service is that a software application can do things ever so much faster and can be scheduled to do it at regular intervals all day long.
As you know, the benwillies web site only lets you upload and download your pictures one at a time, but by using this new web service, you can install some software on your computer that will allow you to choose a folder on your hard-drive and automatically upload all of the files inside it to the benwillies file server while you go get a cup of coffee. If you already have the CLI or Command Line Interpreter version of PHP 4.3 or newer installed, you can download a PHP script called buploader from the xml soap clients folder of The Public Domain to do just that.
Because buploader is a shell script, there is some setup you will need to do before you can use it. The entire program is contained in this one script, which is in plain text with the installation instructions at the top, and can be easily changed to provide more functionality beyond just uploading files. To illustrate some of the possiblities, I've written a little demonstration script called file_client.php that shows how to call nearly every one of the available functions for manipulating the benwillies file server.
Both buploader and file_client use the nusoap.php tool kit, which is a PHP script that takes care of all the heavy lifting required to communicate with an XML Soap web service. For shell scripts, I like the installation to be as easy as possible, so I appended the nusoap script to the end of buploader script to make just one executable file.
The file_client script, however, was designed to be run on your own PHP-enabled web server with the idea of integrating the functions you need into an existing web application, so just create a folder called soap within your web directory then put both the file_client and nusoap scripts in it and you should be able to test it by entering something like http://127.0.0.1/soap/file_client.php in a browser window.
Every Mac OS X 10.3 user already has virtually everything they need to run all of these scripts, especially buploader, because both the regular and CLI versions of PHP, along with the Apache web server, are installed by default. You only need to make a small configuration change to the /etc/httpd/httpd.conf file, to start building your own web applications, perhaps using the file_client script as your first working prototype.
Another option for Mac OS X users is to try a little Xcode application I wrote called Upload Files that simply provides a nice window for specifying the buploader parameters, which it stores in a Preferences file.
In the example shown, the following command was executed:
buploader -upload -u blondie -p secret
-x e19f46e9ccd04f572dcabc40e2986c8b
-w "The Public Domain" -f "Independence Day"
-s Small -n -v ../"Wall Art"
Of course, buploader will need to be installed and if Upload Files can't find it in one of your "bin" directories, it will ask you to locate it, so in this case, if you wanted to avoid using the Terminal, you could, for instance, put buploader in your Documents folder. Both Upload Files and buploader can be downloaded from the xml soap clients folder.
Unfortunately, I only have Mac OS X right now, so if you are a Linux or .Net developer, I encourage you to go the extra mile to write your own GUI for buploader or even a brand new client that does much more. I will be happy to assist you in any way I can, so please contact me if you think this might be something you would be interested in doing.
