*} CodeBloke

Growing number of “community” companies around, constant media pressure and self-proclaimed industry leaders waiting to be recognized.

Hard to distinct buzz from a real value that the Web 2.0 brings.
So, what actually is the Web 2.0?

Actually, my perspective on that is simple It’s just a different way to describe what we’ve got on the table for years, but it’s a good way and for me, worth to follow…

Five down-to-earth reasons to consider Web 2.0 a real breakthrough:

1. For the first time as a mass and common approach to development we have strictly defined interfaces (API’s) accessible via network,
2. Not only the interfaces, but also responsibility is strictly defined,
3. …and really documented, from the Day One online.
4. It practically introduces SOA (services oriented architecture)
5. Ends all discussions on “which programming language is the best for Web”*

*) answer: one you can create an efficient API with…

---

However, talking is a cheap sport and would be nice to demonstrate what I mean.Maybe with some working piece of code…

---

Let’s say we need to:

• Verify delivery address and post code entered by users at the checkout in our web-based B2B ordering system (to avoid possible shipping problems like i.e. delays, returns, etc.).
• Initial purpose is verify the data as they’re only entered on the website, but…
• We need to create a reusable solution, so that it can be used from different platforms (i.e. just in case we would like to extend that functionality on verifying delivery data for orders collected by phone).
• Almost forgot… we’ve got a budget of approx. £200 for that project because this equals a monthly operational cost for re-processing the shipments. Re-delivery cost is usually invoiced on customers as it’s their fault*. They gave us incorrect address, right?

*) Fact: Customers don’t like to pay twice, even if it’s their fault… Plus, your customer care department will spend some extra time on calming them down, but it’s hard to indicate that as direct result of not sanitizing data input, so thing can be successfully masked

Post codes in the United Kingdom it’s not really a complicated issue.

For £750 you can buy CD with raw data from Royal Mail and keep it local.

Royal Mail provides also a ‘Find a postcode‘ service – available here:
http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm/postcodefinder
Search options there are limited to 12 addresses a day… so not really something we were looking for. Plus, we wanted a unified interface. Hmm…

I believe that every 9 y.o. computer geek (even without the MCP) knows how to manually verify address (post code…) with a browser and a search engine.

Our implementation will do exactly the same:

1. We collect unstructured data set from public websites, here google.com, yahoo.co.uk, viamichelin.com and yell.com
2. We compare the results
3. We format results in industry standard XML document

So, we’ve got a web server (1) that is processing requests from users (2) or servers (3). This machine communicates with other web servers (A) fetching for public content and connects my MySQL-to-XML database (B) that contains phone prefixes.

As long as we can provide a correct UK post code we should get a correct set of detailed information formatted as XML.

The result XML above was generated trough a URI:
http://www.codebloke.co.uk/XML/?asXML=MK42+7BU&go=check

Now you can test your sample UK post code over simple web form published here: http://www.codebloke.co.uk/XML/form/

-