This guide describes the Web Services interface within ExtraView. The intended audience is experienced developers who wish to use the Web Services interface to integrate ExtraView to remote external applications that also support a Web Services interface.
ExtraView provides a standardized set of methods to integrate with other applications using a service-orientated architecture (SOA). This complements the web-orientated architecture interface (WOA) that is also implemented within ExtraView and described in the complementary ExtraView Command Line Interface and Application Programming Interface guide. The interface is cross platform and can be accessed from any development platform, including Java and .Net.
A service-oriented architecture is defined as a group of services, which communicate with each other. The process of communication involves either simple data passing or it involves two or more services coordinating some activity. Some means of connecting services to each other is needed.
SOA applications are built out of software services. Services are intrinsically unassociated units of functionality, which have no calls to each other embedded in them. Within ExtraView they map to atomic functions to perform specific actions. Broadly, SOAs implement functionalities most humans would recognize as a service, such as filling out an online application for an account, viewing an online bank statement, inserting an item with a database or running a report. Instead of services embedding calls to each other in their source code, protocols are defined which describe how one or more services can talk to each other. This architecture then relies on your business process expert to link and sequence services to meet your business system requirement.
ExtraView’s implementation of web services utilizes a service-orientated architecture to provide a full set of integration points between ExtraView and the consumer of its web services.
The examples in this documentation were prepared using Java as the foundation. There is no certainty that the helper methods used are available in other languages or platforms. It is expected that the experienced developer will recognize this and be able to use the techniques described and adapt them for their own use.
The Web Services Interface Guide is downloadable as a single PDF by clicking here. You will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this.
