Web Services are growing rapidly and used widely. Many companies are exposing their apps and services through the web and making their products available to broad masses. The growth is also affected due to growing cooperation between J2EE and .NET built web service providers and clients. It is a very good sign, and probably for the first time ever, the JavaPro magazine I subscribe, talked about consuming services written in j2EE with .NET clients. The world might after all be a better place to live :) Anyways, I wrote this simple client app, that connects to Terra servers and gets images of various US locations. The idea is not new and I didn't invent anything, just wrote up a desktop version of what is available on http://www.terraserver.microsoft.com/. I am providing a source code as well (vs.net project file) for those who are interested. There is one part of code borrowed from Terra tutorial, the image scaling part to be exact. I did some mods to that, but basically it is their logic. The rest is all mine. The app is not completely finished, but illustrates the point of consuming web services pretty well.

You can get source or get .NET compiled binary: terra.exe Note, you need .NET framework to run this. Also, the red arrows that you see in the image below, is a custom control that is provided by the dll. You gonna need it to run the application.

Here is the screen shot of the application. It might not be clear (the picture is scaled down). but the location shown on the screen is my school campus, and the ballpark on the left is our great Comiskey Park, now known as Cellular Field.

Your comments and suggestions are always welcome, just email me!