Evaluating Webservices for OAR FDMS

Eugene F Burger
Pacific Marine Enironmental Lab, OAR

Webservices allows you to expose a software-programming interface over the web to be accessed remotely. Webservices are implemented using industry agreed on standards (AML, SOAP, HTTP) thus holding the promise of wider use than competing technologies. By combining relatively simple individual webservices with other distributed services one can provide a more complex service in a platform independent way.

We wrote a test application to evaluate webservices as a possible future technology with the OAR Financial Data Management system (FDMS). The application extracts data from a SQLServer database, and XSLT (XSL Transformation Language) is used to convert the result set’s to HTML. Remote procedure calls and result sets were transmitted XML SOAP messages. The backend software was written in the Java language.

This presentation will discuss the implementation and our findings of webservices on the applicability in the context of the FDMS application.