Related subject matter may be found in the following commonly assigned, co-pending U.S. patent applications, which are hereby incorporated by reference herein:
Ser. No. 10/184,330, entitled “SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR TRANSPARENTLY ACCESSING WEB APPLICATIONS REMOTELY AND LOCALLY”;
Ser. No. 10/185,779, entitled “SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR MESSAGING IN A MULTI-FRAME WEB APPLICATION”; and
Ser. No. 10/185,796, entitled “SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR ACCESSING WEB SERVICES USING A TAG LIBRARY”.
The present invention is related in general to data processing systems, and in particular, to accessing and exploring Web services in a distributed data processing system.
The advent of networked data processing systems, and, particularly, the network of networks referred to as the Internet, has spurred the introduction of distributed data processing services. In such systems, a client, typically remotely connected to the service provider via one or more networks, accesses data processing services which are implemented on the remote data processing system which returns the results of the data processing activity to the client. It has become common to use the services represented by the World Wide Web (WWW) with its graphical user interface (GUI) orientation to provide the interface to such distributed data processing services.
Typically, in such distributed processing systems, the client sends a request to the server. The request may include one or more parameters which may be inputs to the particular service requested.
On the server side, the system builds a Web page for returning the response to the requesting client. The server accesses a server page containing code that defines the Web page. Embedded in the code for generating the page, i.e. HTML script, is code that is executable by the server to generate the requested data processing service to generate the necessary HTML script to display the results on the client machine.
A Web browser running on the client machine is an application that can interpret the HTML and display the page on a conventional display such as a CRT monitor connected to the client machine. Commercially available Web browsers include Netscape Navigator®, Mozilla, Internet Explorer®, iCab, and Opera. Technologies for implementing distributed computing services in this way include Active Server Pages (ASP) and Java™ Server Pages (JSP). Additionally, such services may access server-side application software to perform some or all of the requested tasks via an environment-independent interprocess communication application program interface (API) such as DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model), CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) or Remote Method Invocation (RMI). In response to execution of the page by the browser, the application software generates dynamic data and returns the data to the client which then displays the data in accordance with the code defining the page. Additionally, as described further below, the server-side application need not reside on the same hardware as the page server, but may be deployed on other hardware that may be remote from both the client and the page server.
The increasing deployment of XML compliant systems has led to the development of distributed data processing technologies that are not constrained to the object-model specific protocols, such as DCOM, RMI or CORBA. XML which refers to the eXtensible Markup Language is a tag-based markup language for describing structured data. Unlike HTML, XML tags are not predefined. XML is a meta-markup language. XML includes a mechanism, XML schema and data type definitions (DTD), to convey information about a document's structure and data types. The XML specification is promulgated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). XML (and derivatives thereof) enable the access to distributed data processing services using standard Internet protocols. Such distributed, application-to-application data processing implementations may, generically, be referred to as Web services. An XML derivative that may be used to describe Web services is the Web Service Definition Language (WSDL). A WSDL document defines the messages a particular Web service accepts and generates.
Although the DWSL is a rich language for describing Web services, abstracting and evaluating the Web service interface from the WSDL description is a challenge for the developer of a Web page that may use the Web service. Web developers have a multiplicity of approaches available to them for developing Web pages. That is, for any Web programming problem, there are a multiplicity of programming solution domains that the user may choose. For example, some developers may prefer writing Java Server Pages (JSP) tags to deliver Web content. Others may prefer writing in Java™ and develop content using Java™ servlets. Still others may use Javascript. Each of these classes of Web developers will have a different programming perspective and different requirements when analyzing a Web service for potential use in an application. The “raw” WSDL description of the Web service may not be the effectively meet the requirements of these developers. Thus, there is a need in the art for mechanisms to evaluate Web services whereby the WSDL information is conveyed in a perspective, or equivalently, view that is consonant with the developer's preferred programming domain. Additionally, there is a further need for a mechanism to execute sample calls to the Web service using that view of the Web service, and to execute sample calls to the service.
The problems outlined above may at least in part be solved in some embodiments by evaluating the Web services interface and executing sample calls to the service. In one embodiment of the present invention, a method for displaying Web services may comprise the step of generating a data model of a description of the Web service. The method may further comprise the step of applying a perspective visitor to the generated data model where the perspective visitor corresponds to a preselected domain. The method may further comprise the step of displaying a perspective of the Web service associated with the preselected domain in response to applying the perspective visitor. The perspective visitor may comprise a visitor pattern for encapsulating an operation to be performed on elements of the data model.
The foregoing has outlined rather broadly the features and technical advantages of one or more embodiments of the present invention in order that the detailed description of the invention that follows may be better understood. Additional features and advantages of the invention will be described hereinafter which form the subject of the claims of the invention.
For a more complete understanding of the present invention, and the advantages thereof, reference is now made to the following descriptions taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, in which:
FIGS. 6.1-6.3 illustrate exemplary Graphical User Interface (GUI) views of perspectives of a Web services page in accordance with the present inventive principles;
In the following description, numerous specific details are set forth to provide a thorough understanding of the present invention. For example, exemplary code for accessing particular web services may be described, however it would be recognized by those of ordinary skill in the art that the present invention may be practiced without such specific details, and in other instances, well-known circuits have been shown in block diagram form in order not to obscure the present invention in unnecessary detail. Refer now to the drawings wherein depicted elements are not necessarily shown to scale and wherein like or similar elements are designated by the same reference numeral through the several views.
Referring to
Page server 108 responds to the request by returning the requested page in response 112. The requested page may include data that is to be generated dynamically. Such dynamic data may be generated locally on the user machine in response to client browser 104 executing the script defining the page returned in response 112. Additionally, dynamic data may be generated by a remote process. This may further be in response to code in the page returned by page server 108 in response 112 via a request to a remote server, such as web services server 114. On execution of the page received in response 112, the corresponding code in the page generates service request 116 which is directed to web services server 114. Web services server 114 may execute a web services application 118 in response that generates the dynamic data. The data is returned in a services response 120 to page server 108. The data may be returned as XML data via a SOAP message. SOAP is a proposed standard, promulgated by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). (The draft specifications for SOAP 1.2 may be found in Simple Object Access Protocol 1.2, http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP12.) The SOAP specification is hereby incorporated herein by reference. (SOAP was initially an acronym for Simple Object Access Protocol; as of version 1.2 it is no longer an acronym.) Page server 108 incorporates the data in a page and sends the page to the client browser in a response 112.
To request the web service for generating the dynamic data, the page sent to client browser 104 in a response 112 must have the appropriate code to access the web service. For example, the request may be embedded in a SOAP message. However, as previously described, web services are typically defined in a WSDL document. A methodology for generating multiple perspectives of the Web service, including a SOAP perspective, will be discussed in conjunction with
The flowcharts provided herein are not necessarily indicative of the serialization of operations being performed in an embodiment of the present invention. Steps disclosed within these flowcharts may be performed in parallel. The flowcharts are indicative of those considerations that may be performed to produce the operations available for generating and displaying multiple perspectives of a Web service. It is further noted that the order presented is illustrative and does not necessarily imply that the steps must be performed in order shown.
Refer now to
In step 206, the perspectives are created using the data model from step 204. The generation of the perspectives will be further described in conjunction with
In step 208, an iteration over the perspectives created in step 206 is initiated. For each perspective, the perspective is displayed in step 210, and in step 212 the iteration over the perspectives terminates. Process 200 concludes in step 214.
Refer now to
A data model of the WSDL page may be a tree-like representation of the page. Referring to
Returning to
Conversely, if the WSDL page is in cache, the previously cached WSDL data model is retrieved, step 310. In step 312, the data model is input to step 206,
Referring now to
In step 504, an iteration loop over the perspective list is entered. In step 506, a perspective visitor pattern is applied to the WSDL data model, for each perspective in the list. As described hereinabove, the WSDL data model may be represented as a tree-like data structure in which the nodes thereof correspond to operations of the web service, and respective inputs and outputs thereto. A visitor pattern is a mechanism to encapsulate an operation to be performed on the elements of the data model. (A visitor pattern may also be referred to in the object-oriented programming art as a visitor design pattern or, alternatively, for the purposes herein simply as a “visitor.”) In other words, the perspective visitor is an object that encapsulates operations on the nodes of the WSDL data model, in particular the operation of rendering a perspective of the WSDL node. Thus, for example, a Java perspective visitor may render the WSDL data model into Java snippets. Thus, calling this perspective visitor on an node representing a Web service operation, such as node 404,
Step 506 may be performed by the visitor traversing the WSDL data model tree. At each node, the node “accepts” the perspective visitor which sends a message to the perspective visitor. In other words, the node makes a call to the perspective visitor, passing itself in, and the perspective visitor executes its methods to populate the particular perspective it generates. Thus, because the node itself calls back to the perspective visitor, and the node is passed to the perspective visitor by the node itself, the perspective visitor may execute the appropriate polymorphic method to generate the perspective corresponding to the calling node of the data structure, that is the tree-like data model of the WSDL document. These operations are illustrated in steps 552-562 of
FIGS. 6.1-6.3 illustrate exemplary GUI windows 602a-c, respectively displaying a JSP taglib perspective, Java™, and SOAP message perspective for a Web service that provides weather data. (JSP taglibs are discussed in the commonly-owned copending U.S. patent application entitled “Systems And Methods For Accessing Web Services Using A Tag Library,” Ser. No. 10/185,796, hereby incorporated herein by reference.) Such a weather service may be used, for example, to retrieve weather data to display a current temperature and a forecast for a particular locale in a Web page. The WSDL document for the service may specify that when the browser sends a request to generate the data, call the “GetTemperature” method, and the inputs needed are a zip code, or other locale identifier. Correspondingly, in window 602a, the operation 604 is specified to be, in taglib call 606 to “GetTemperature.” Similarly, the input type 608 is specified as “zipcode.” Thus, the locale for which the service will provide the weather data is specified by setting a zip code. As described below in conjunction with
Refer now to
A representative hardware environment for practicing the present invention is depicted in
Display monitor 838 is connected to system bus 812 by display adapter 836. In this manner, a user is capable of inputting to the system throughout the keyboard 854, trackball 835 or mouse 856 and receiving output from the system via speaker 858, display 838.
Preferred implementations of the invention include implementations as a computer system programmed to execute the method or methods described herein, and as a computer program product. According to the computer system implementation, sets of instructions for executing the method or methods are resident in the random access memory 914 of one or more computer systems configured generally as described above. These sets of instructions, in conjunction with system components that execute them may generate multiple perspectives of a Web service and execute sample calls to the Web service. Until required by the computer system, the set of instructions may be stored as a computer program product in another computer memory, for example, in disk drive 820 (which may include a removable memory such as an optical disk or floppy disk for eventual use in the disk drive 820). Further, the computer program product can also be stored at another computer and transmitted when desired to the user's workstation by a network or by an external network such as the Internet. One skilled in the art would appreciate that the physical storage of the sets of instructions physically changes the medium upon which it is stored so that the medium carries computer readable information. The change may be electrical, magnetic, chemical, biological, or some other physical change. While it is convenient to describe the invention in terms of instructions, symbols, characters, or the like, the reader should remember that all of these and similar terms should be associated with the appropriate physical elements.
Note that the invention may describe terms such as comparing, validating, selecting, identifying, or other terms that could be associated with a human operator. However, for at least a number of the operations described herein which form part of at least one of the embodiments, no action by a human operator is desirable. The operations described are, in large part, machine operations processing electrical signals to generate other electrical signals.
Preferred implementations of the invention include implementations as a computer system programmed to execute the method or methods described herein, and as a computer program product. According to the computer system implementation, sets of instructions for executing the method or methods are resident in the random access memory 914 of one or more computer systems configured generally as described above. These sets of instructions in conjunction with the system components which execute them, may execute sample calls to a Web service. Until required by the computer system, the set of instructions may be stored as a computer program product in another computer memory, for example, in disk drive 920 (which may include a removable memory such as an optical disk or floppy disk for eventual use in the disk drive 920). Further, the computer program product can also be stored at another computer and transmitted when desired to the user's workstation by a network or by an external network such as the Internet. One skilled in the art would appreciate that the physical storage of the sets of instructions physically changes the medium upon which it is stored so that the medium carries computer readable information. The change may be electrical, magnetic, chemical, biological, or some other physical change. While it is convenient to describe the invention in terms of instructions, symbols, characters, or the like, the reader should remember that all of these and similar terms should be associated with the appropriate physical elements.
Although the present invention and its advantages have been described in detail, it should be understood that various changes, substitutions and alterations can be made herein without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention as defined by the appended claims.
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