Graphical Database XML Mapping and Transformation

Allora Web Services are included when you purchase a developer license for Allora.

Web services are commonly described as units of business logic (a web service for calculating shipping charges, for example) that are widely available for use (accessible via a web page, for example.) However, web services can also be offered at the system level and at varying levels of availability. Within a single large organization, a web service might be made available to remote IT departments so that they can access a database located at corporate head quarters. Allora offers this type of web service.

Web services make use of the same level of security that is available for any internet application: SSL, digital certificates, VPN, encryption (in particular XML encryption). This provides a very high level of security necessary to mission-critical software systems.

Allora Web Services offer two different options for developing client applications:

• Option 1:
  A client application with no Allora client-side libraries
  This requires a knowledge of the SOAP protocol and SOAP client APIs, and allows you to perform simple marshalling operations to retrieve data from a relational database as XML or update a database with XML data. The advantage of this approach is that it is language-independent. Although jllora libraries are required on the server, the client application can be written in any language for which there is a client SOAP API available. The STAR Test Results web services demo uses this approach.
   
  
• Option 2:
  A client application with full Allora libraries for
  complete control over marshalling and unmarshalling
  This requires you to include both AlloraWeb.jar and Allora.jar in your application. With these libraries, you can use XMLRecord, XMLSchemaMapper and most of the XMLRecordset methods to work with relational data in a remote location via SOAP. Applications must be written in Java.
   
  

To use the Allora web service, users must have a group ID and password and access to one or more data sources. Allora includes a Web Service Administrator to configure user access and data sources.

A data source contains information about the database server, the JDBC driver used to connect to the database server and the user ID and password for the database server. A data source also allows you to identify the relational data you want to work with by specifying a SQL query, a table or a Allora mapping file.

While groups provide some security for server access, we recommend that you use the Allora Web Service in conjunction with SSL for a standard secure environment.