After a day of getting the web services api from cj running and playing with it, I say it sucks: 1. You have to use soap, no straight xml 2. The PHP example requires PHP 5's soap to run. I don't have PHP 5 anywere, spent the day today learning nusoap to make it work on PHP 4. Soap is something I've been avoiding forever, I use my own simple xml routines for everything I do. 3. The contexual advertising is not what appears. It is just a lame perl script that requires soap lite installed on the server. It's just the api with crappy perl code around it. 4. Only a small amount of advertisers available in the api data (f u k!) 5. Only a small amount of data from said advertisers available (f u k!) Pretty much wasted a day for something that is useless to me at the moment. But hey, I learned soap today .. all clean now.
If you need a real development capability, soap framework is a option. What you can do with straight XML? You are telling this due you don't know what is soap - just develop over examples and you will be fine. I've not tried it Are you sure that the examples requires PHP 5? give an example. If this is true it sucks. Not sure, maybe you are having difficulties to setup it - try to post your technicals doubts point by point into the API forum. As soon you setup it I think that you will like it. its too early yet - it just launched - give it some weeks of life.
With soap you have to make a POST request with all parameters in the POST surrounded by tags. With straight XML you use a GET request with all parameters on the url. Alexa, amazon etc use GET as well as POST I did after I learned nusoap as the example from cj requires the PHP 5 soap class Download the example from webservices.cj.com yourself I do have it setup and running. I do like it. It's just useless with the lack of data. The ws_team in the cj forums confirms that a only a few advertisers data is available. Why did they release it incomplete? They should have released it as a public beta.
Apparently, there is not enough publishers enabled it the api yet as it is too early - but beta is about stability (like bugs, etc) there is no evidence of lack of stability yet - lets wait and see. I understand your concerns that you would post XML instead of soap - but as soon you run the first time I'm sure that you will approve it.
Argg. I was expecting some xml return (like amazon) that I could easily parse out, but no suck luck either. Too bad.
The documentation looks like it is supported but no one can get it to work. If you want to see the data returned you can go to http://chkdom.com on the bottom of the main plage, I just added a quick search for my own testing purposes.
Hehe, it seems that the API is full of bugs anyway. If you still want to find out, you can use this class which can use SOAP without even php5
amazon were smart enough to realize that many languages still don't have perfect support for SOAP, and have kept their REST interfaces running
Have you looked at Pear::SOAP? I got rid of nusoap for this option and have been happy with it. You probably know this, but here's a note... Note: Refer to http://api.cj.com for the most recent versions of the service WSDLs. The WSDLs provides all the programmatic information you need to use the APIs. Then all ya need is a class for each api and api call to process the return. (yep, another days work)