WebSphere Portlet Factory

Web Services Integration

IBM WebSphere® Portlet Factory makes Web services accessible for all developers creating portlets. With WebSphere Portlet Factory, developers can create and consume Web services without needing to spend weeks learning SOAP, WSDL, XML schema (XSD), or any of the typical Web services programming techniques, like creating proxy stubs. Instead, Builders fully automate the creation and consumption of Web services, hiding the complexities of the standards, and making Web services integration fast and easy.

The major Web service Builders and their associated features are:

Service Call Builder

The Service Call Builder enables quick and easy consumption of Web services, including WSDL-enabled, HTTP GET/POST, SOAP-RPC, SOAP Document style, and local services.

Key features

• Automation of all basic Web service interactions, including automatic generation of an invocation method, and of variables to hold the input and return data. The Builder will also generate an associated schema that describes the data.
• Easy-to-use Builder interface masks the complexity of the underlying standards. For example, a developer can provide a URL to a WSDL and then click the 'Fetch WSDL' button to get the service's details. The Builder will retrieve the WSDL, parse it, and refresh the Builder Call UI to display the details of the service, including all of the available operations and their associated inputs, including SOAP headers. Developers do not have to understand any of the WSDL to effectively create powerful Web service-driven applications and portlets.
• Indirect references enable developers to easily create dynamic applications where the values for different inputs can be determined at runtime, including the SOAP and HTTP headers, username and password, and input(s) to the service. Thus, for example, the input(s) to a service can come from many different sources such as user input, the results of a method call, or a profile.
• Dynamic handling of service location changes enables developers to easily override the service URL, hostname, and port specified in the WSDL document. This feature enables developers to easily test services using TCP Tunnel. It also allows for easy migration of applications from a development to production environment.
• WS-I v 1.0. compliant. This Builder has been thoroughly and rigorously tested against the WS-I basic profile v1.0 to ensure interoperability with other vendors, including Microsoft®, BEA®, as well as IBM.
• Built-in logging support enables capture of the service request and response, facilitating debugging.
• Easy exception handling. If an error occurs during invocation of the service, the invoke method will throw an exception, such as connection failed, timeout occurred, invalid URL, unknown host, class not found, and parser error. These exceptions can be easily caught with the Error Handler Builder.
• Automated mapping of name/value pairs. Effortlessly translate data from a view, profile document, or formula into user-friendly text, select lists, or radio buttons.
• Dummy (stub) result feature allows developers to stub out a return value, rather than actually calling the service. This functionality eases Model testing and rapid prototyping by allowing a Model to run without requiring the service to be up and running.
• Basic authentication information can be easily supplied via the Builder interface.

Web Service Enable Builder

The Web Service Enable Builder automatically turns a model or methods in a model into a Web service.

Key features

• Automatic generation of WSDL based upon the inputs developers enter into the wizard-like Builder interface. Developers can graphically specify a namespace, response schema, descriptions for the arguments and methods.
• Flexible SOAP and encoding styles. Developers can easily create SOAP RPC style web services or Document style services. In addition, the encoding style can be either encoded or literal.
• On-demand WSDL generation. Any changes to the underlying Model or methods are automatically reflected in the WSDL, without requiring any additional changes or republishing.
• Robust profiling support. Developers can also leverage the power of profiling so that one Model can return different WSDL-described services depending on the specified profile. As a result, highly customized services can be built and delivered on the fly.