What are iMIS SOA Web Services?

Web services are a collection of web and object-oriented technologies for linking web-based applications running on different hardware, software, database, or network platforms. For example, web services could link key business functions within the applications a business shares with its customers, suppliers, and business partners.

iMIS Web Services are an SOA-based set of services to programmatically use iMIS. iMIS Web Services includes both WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) and HTTP REST Web API types of application programming interface (API). Regardless of the API, iMIS Web Services uses data-contract programming objects to exchange data. A simple way to look at iMIS Web Services is that iMIS Web Services presents a universal web-based API to iMIS that can allow a wide variety of customer and partner developer applications to communicate with iMIS, regardless of technology or application platform. For instance, applications can be written in Microsoft .NET technologies, or almost any other platform such as Java, or JavaScript, and do not need to be server-based. In addition, AJAX applications can access iMIS Web Services.

Applications written in Microsoft .NET technologies can utilize a supplied or programmer-generated web-service client interface with a wide variety of protocols, including HTTP/REST, HTTP/SOAP, HTTPS, TCP, and others, and can use a wide variety of security bindings. Other non-Microsoft technologies can access iMIS SOA by way of HTTP/SOAP and Web Services Interoperability (WS-I). According to the needs, wide varieties of security bindings are available.