The One-click Web Service

Another post from Jamie Wang, Ipedo's Director of Engineering. He's rapidly becoming one of my regular guest bloggers. Enjoy. -S.P.

Many developers have wondered how much effort it takes to expose the information they have combined in an EII server to an SOA. In the XIP 4.2 release, the process to publish virtualized relational and XML information as a Web Service has been greatly simplified.  So simple, in fact, that we call it the “One-click Web Service.”

In this new release, Ipedo has introduced a new concept called “Data Services.”  This is an area where all of the views are published and made available as a service.  The release was designed to meet both the needs of team development and better support SOA.

Under Data Services, you will see that Ipedo XIP supports three types: Web Services, SQL Data Services and XQuery Data Services. These are all based on industry standards. The Web Services model supports SOAP binding and WSDL. The SQL Data Services model uses standard JDBC access and has full SQL 99 compatibility. The XQuery Data Services model supports XQuery 1.0. This is a very powerful combination of standards support. Just imagine how you can access information no matter what data access standards they require.  All of this is only one click away.  In this entry, we’ll focus on the Web Services model.

Creating a Web Service

The first step in publishing a view is to add a Web Service and give it a name. We’ll call this one ‘CRM Data Service,’ which will publish data from relational databases, as you can see the screen below. We click OK to save the Web Service.

Publish a View

The next step is to decide which view you want to expose to your user as the CRM Data Service. Here I have a view CUSTOMERORDERS that combines customer information in Microsoft SQL Server and order information from Oracle. Next use the Publish Wizard to publish the view. See the screen below. We click OK and voila, the view is published as a Web Service.

We wanted to write a longer post, but that’s all it takes.  Really.

Comments

[al]

1. where view defintion reside?
2. where is WSDL?
3. how to integrate with this data service from client application?
4. where are config files?

Thanks,

[jamie]

View definition resides within the EII server and its metadata can be exported. WSDL is dynamically generated when you issue a url of the form: http://server:port/webservicename/viewname?wsdl where webservicename is the name of the service you created and view name is name of your view. Application can integrate using standard SOAP binding and there's no config file required for using data service.