This is step 1 of a demo of an API for Pos Malaysia. More about this in my blog. Enter a weight below, select a destination and click 'Quote'.
It's slow. That's the point. I'm using a big fat webpage (designed for humans to admire) from Pos's website to extract a single price using pattern matching. Previously retrieved quotes are cached at spider.my and are available using a very simple AJAX feature on this page which should display 'live' quotations as the weight and destination are changed.
You can see from the XML URL provided with a Quote result that the amount of data exchanged in the cached result is tiny. Try flipping between destination countries - seems lightweight, doesn't it? Those requests are traversing the globe!
Check out the AJAX-only shipping quotation in part 2!