VisualWorks White Paper: Web Services in Cincom VisualWorks
- To download a PDF version of this white paper, click here.
Web services have become a mission-critical component of applications, supporting communications and commerce independent of platforms and programming languages. The technology enables companies to provide public access to proprietary software without distributing the software and data outside their organizations. This is accomplished through a software interface that describes operations that can be accessed over the network through standardized Extensible Markup Language (XML) messaging. Using protocols based on the XML language, web services describe an operation to execute or data to exchange.
Cincom VisualWorks supports web services technology built on such existing and emerging standards as HTTP; XML; XPath, as a language for addressing parts of an XML document; Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP); Web Services Description Language (WSDL); and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI).
Potential web services developed in VisualWorks could be any application: authentication, phrase translation, currency conversion, shipping status lookup, or database queries, to name just a few. VisualWorks imposes no restrictions on the size of the application.
VisualWorks enables developers to create both web services providers and requestors. The service provider is the server side, the platform that hosts the service, while the service requestor is the client side, the application that is interacting with a service. The service requestor can be a browser driven by a user or a program without a user interface, such as another web service.