HTML Form to Web Service Gateway Ross Shannon Supervisor: Dr. Nick Kushmerick Moderator: Dr. Mel Ó Cinnéide

Web Services Modular, self-describing applications deployed and invoked from anywhere on the Web Can be thought of as calling a function across the Internet Most programming languages have a way of requesting web services A number of companies have created web services, but they’re not as widespread as was hoped Two main layers: Description and Invocation

WSDL “Web Services Description Language” Programmer’s manual on how to call a web service Defines –Methods available from a service –Names and types of each argument

WSDL Example

SOAP “Simple Object Access Protocol” Uses existing standards like XML, HTTP etc. Client wraps the request in a “SOAP Envelope” for transport Once the service has responded to the request, it wraps the response in SOAP and passes it back

SOAP Example A simple SOAP message to call a procedure that requires a single parameter: YHOO

SOAP Example (2) The SOAP response to the preceding request: 31.2

Project Dichotomy… The project needs two parts: 1.Convert all forms on a page into an equivalent WSDL description

Project Dichotomy… (2) And a second part: 2.Allow invocations of the “service” by responding to SOAP requests and converting these back into normal form submits

Future Work Make better guesses at WSDL types Clean up HTML output Cross-validate SOAP request with WSDL file