This session explores the creation of an Open Service from simple URL-line parameters to comprehensive and flexible API and full-blown Web Service with XML-RPC and SOAP interfaces.

Meerkat is an Open Wire Service aggregating RSS feeds, an XML specification used for distributing news, product announcements, discussion threads, and other assorted content and metadata as channels. Meerkat provides various interfaces to its aggregated data-store, including a Web-based reader, various output "flavors," and Web Service back-ends.

Topics include design decisions, good and bad, exposing a Weblication's innards, effective API development, the importance of documentation, enabling derived services and applications, and an array of technologies and formats involved: PHP, Perl, XML, RSS, XML-RPC, SOAP (SOAP::Lite), JavaScript, MySQL, and more.