PCA Web Services Libraries

PCA Web Services Libraries

The Practical Computer Applications (PCA) Web Services Libraries, also known as the Smart Client Libraries serve as the intermediate communications layer for PCA’s Smart Client Applications. It is comprised of two components: One built into the client applications that acts as the communications layer to the client and a second one on the Web Server that communicates to the Database Server.  Our Web Services Libraries are built on Microsoft’s WCF (Windows Communications Foundation) components.

Benefits:

• Secure Communications
• Faster Application Performance
• Superior Caching Technology
• Simple to Implement
• Server & Bandwidth Economies
• Increase Developer Efficiencies

Capabilities:

• Full binary encoding of the communication payload, in both directions (client to server to client).
• Operates efficiently across Internet/Intranet security boundaries and firewalls without the need for unusual IT intervention, software/security policy modifications, or additional hardware changes.
• Local client-side binary caching of data, stored in memory, persisted to disk, or both (fully encrypted when persisted to disk) significantly reduces network traffic while improving application responsiveness, even over thin/slow network connections.
• Data compression greatly reduces network load resulting in much faster application operation and response times, and geared toward the return of large data sets.
• Encryption easily activated and piggybacked onto existing secure communications layer using pre-existing certificates while leveraging the resources of the web server.
• Standard API promotes high quality code reuse among different developers/applications.
• API enables concise programming paradigm which combines multiple database calls into a single server call, reducing development time and network traffic with increased application responsiveness.
• Remote status and speed check functions to confirm health and report status of the Application Service.

Compatibilities:

• Designed specifically to work with Microsoft SQL Server, resulting in enhanced speed and reliability.
• Fully compatible with and specifically designed for IIS (Microsoft Internet Information Server) running on Microsoft Windows 2003/2008 Servers.
• Fully implemented with Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, taking advantaged of .NET managed memory allocation.

Standards:

• Fully compliant with W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) definition/standards for a web service.
• Fully compliant with WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization) web service specifications.
• Uses standard HTTP 1.1 (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) as developed by W3C and the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) in RFC 2616.
• Automatically falls back to HTTP 1.0 standards if HTTP 1.1 is not supported on the network path
• Fully compatible with standard secure communications (encryption/authentication) using HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Sockets Layer)
• Uses standard XML 1.0 (Extensible Markup Language) as recommended by W3C.
• Uses standard SOAP 1.2 (Simple Object Access Protocol) as recommended by W3C and the XML Protocol Working Group.

Results:

• Faster Application Performance

Questions? Call us at 1-877-843-3405 or use our form to request more information.