Description

Web services provide a standard means of interaction among different software components running on a variety of platforms and frameworks. Web services are accessible from both PowerScript and JSP Web target applications that you create in PowerBuilder. Both target types use the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) for the exchange of information with Web services, but the processing of that information is not the same in each target type.

Usage

SOAP processing in PowerScript targets  Web service client applications in a PowerScript target type use classes from SourceForge.Net's EasySoap project as well as PowerBuilder Native Interface (PBNI) extension classes. The PowerBuilder setup program installs the EasySoap DLL in the Sybase\Shared\PowerBuilder directory and, beginning with PowerBuilder 10, renames it to reflect the current PowerBuilder version. Despite the name change, PowerBuilder does not change the source code for the DLL.

In a PowerScript target, the PBNI extension classes instantiated by Web service client applications use Unicode for all internal processing. However, calls to component methods are converted to ANSI for processing by EasySoap, and data returned from these calls are converted to Unicode.

SOAP processing in JSP targets  In PowerBuilder 10, JSP targets use the Apache Software Foundation's Axis software for SOAP processing. The Axis software includes support for user­-defined complex datatypes and document type Web Service Description Language (WSDL) files.

Axis provides a WSDL2Java tool that builds Java proxies and skeletons for Web services with WSDL descriptions. Axis follows the Java API for XML-Based Remote Procedure Calls (JAX-RPC) specification when generating Java client bindings from the WSDL descriptions and generates only those bindings necessary for the client.

For more information

For more information about SOAP processing in JSP targets, see Working with Web and JSP Targets.