"Business without Boundaries"

Features

• Benefits

• Security

• Unique Features

Tutorial

• Overview

• Components

• nTegrator and XML

• nTegrator and Web Services

• Developing an Application

• Deployment

Case Studies

• 6 Steps to EAI
• Wireless e-mail

nTegrator and Web Services

Many attempts have been made to define a standard way for a program on one computer to invoke and exchange data with a program on another computer. Most of these have met with limited acceptance because of the difficulty of establishing and maintaining a communications link between the two computers and because of the difficulty of mapping data formats. The advent of the World Wide Web has gone a long way to addressing the first problem, while the advent of a mechanism to identify structured information in computer systems (XML) has addressed the second problem. Standards bodies have created several standards that govern how XML based messages can be exchanged over the WWW.  Programs that communicate using these standards are referred to a Web Services. The most common of these is the SOAP protocol, which defines the structure of an XML based message that can be used to invoke a web service. The SOAP message contains information about the service to be invoked and the values of the parameters that are required by or returned from the service.

All communications within the nTegrator environment are carried out by exchanging nTegrator messages. These messages contain information about the nTegrator service to be invoked and the value of the parameters being exchanged. As was the case for nTegrator XML representations, a SOAP message must be parsed in order to transform it into a machine understandable format. In nTegrator, the message is always kept and exchanged in an internal, machine understandable format so that parsing is not necessary. It is only converted into a text based SOAP message when it needs to be sent to a program outside of the nTegrator environment.

In nTegrator, every component acts as a web service. If a component is activated from within the nTegrator environment, the no conversion between an nTegrator message and a SOAP message is necessary. A conversion to/ from SOAP is needed only if the nTegrator service is invoked from outside of the nTegrator environment.