PART III
Chapter 10: Web Services and Beyond 505
No doubt the communications process could be abstracted so that you could form
SOAP packets more programmatically in JavaScript, but our point here is simply that Web
Services using SOAP can certainly live in the world of Ajax.Screen Scraping
Sometimes public sites don’t provide clear APIs for programmers. In these cases, developers
interested in using the data or services provided by the site resort to an idea called screen
scraping. The basic sense of screen scraping is to browse the site literally as a normal human
browser would, fetch the HTML and other resources, and then extract the pieces of interest
to use in their own way—for good or for ill.To use a simple example, let’s issue a query at Google: