Update March 26th: they seem to be up and running again!
I’ve been using weather.willab.fi weather service located here in Oulu, at the VTT research center, for years in many of my courses.
It has been a good demo for teaching many basic computing and networking topics, for example:
- how to use curl to execute network requests and look at the different HTTP headers the server provides in the response;
- how HTTP works on top of lower level protocols (TCP), using Wireshark for traffic analysis;
- localization of simple Android and iOS apps;
- what is JSON and XML and how they look like with simple weather data;
- what is a server and what is a client on the Internet;
- and maybe something else I do not remember now.
But anyways, the service has been down for some time, returning weather data from around December 2022. Now it is even worse; it just displays the nginx server welcome page, and HTTP 404 when you try to get the current weather contents using http://weather.willab.fi/weather.json.
Hopefully they will kick the service up and running soon! Otherwise I need to rewrite many exercises and demo apps to use some other simple service.