watch this  

While working on adding forecast support to my Quicksilver plugin, I was investigating web services (in particular SOAP) support in Cocoa. From the Xcode documentation it initially looked like Applescript was the way to go. However, a little investigation turned up a WebServices framework inside the CoreServices framework! Strangely enough, these two (Part 1, Part 2) articles on Bioinformatics at the MacDevCenter on O’Reilly were absolute Gold Mines!

What really impressed me about the Apple’s covert support for webservices was the WSMakeStubs utility. Basically, you feed it a URL to a WSDL file and it generates the appropriate “wrapper” code in the language of your choice (Objective-C, AppleScript or C++). Very slick. It literally took a matter of minutes to add client-side webservices support to my app.

Before discovering the WebServices framework, I found AEXMLTutor . In a nutshell, you can enter some webservices AppleScript and it will give you back a ton of feedback… Much more than Script Editor.

Once I can parse the forecast data from the NOAA, I’ll update my Quicksilver plugin. Won’t be long!