Should I use SOAP or REST to automate external web service searching?

Question

I hope to create an application which will send a barcode serial to this database:

http://www.upcdatabase.com/itemform.asp

which is a universal barcode repository for foods.

The food description is then returned to my application, which I will then identify the keyword of the food product, for example yogurt.

Once I have this keyword, I take it to this webpage:

http://nutridb.org/

And enter it into the search field, returning the nutritional values of the item, which I will then extract and present as information in my application.

I have been researching online and am confused as to how I can automate this process. Is it possible this can be done using REST and SOAP?

Answer 1

That upcdatabase site you mention has an XML-RPC interface to it, so I would say you are probably limited to that. You could use a RESTful approach to screen scrape but I looked at the HTML and there is little or no semantic markup in the HTML so it is going to be hard.