AbstractsComputer Science

A new way to access different kinds of services on the web is to develop web service interfaces and call the web service operations directly from a JavaScript client. This report describes a general such web service interface from JavaScript, called the Functional web Service Client (FSC). FSC loads the WSDL document into DOM object and parses its structure to build the web service request data. It provides a public API that can be called directly from a JavaScript application. The communication between the client and the web service operations uses the XML-based SOAP protocol. FSC simplifies Ajax applications by making it very simple to call web service operations as functions. It allows both synchronous and asynchronous function calls to the web service operations. To illustrate the functionality of FSC, an existing web application, the course manager, was re-implemented as a web service as an alternative to the previous implementation as a conventional server side TomCat application. The course manager uses the functional DBMS Amos II to represent information about courses, students taking courses, exercises, etc. Rather than providing the functionality of the course manager as a web based user interface, the new implementation provides a course manager web service along with a JavaScript application implementing a user interface that calls the course manager web service operations using FSC. The course manager web service is automatically generated by the WSMOS system that, for given functions implemented in Amos II, deploys web service operations and generates a WSDL document.