| Web Services are one of the most recent and significant technology inventions to come out of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and provide an industry standard means to achieve system-to-system integration between two or more business applications over an Intranet or Internet. In today's enterprise environments, a LIMS cannot be considered an isolated or standalone application, because there are business critical needs to share important laboratory data with other applications inside and outside the enterprise. Thanks to the Internet, there is now a robust and highly supported mechanism to achieve application integration using Web Services. LabWare WebLIMS™ offers comprehensive support for Web Services and ships with more than 300+ web services for the most common LIMS functions such as logging samples, retrieving test results, performing calculations. In addition to providing Web Services, LabWare LIMS can consume Web Services that are published by other applications.
In order to fully utilize Web Services, there are a number of prerequisites that a LIMS must have to be Web Service compliant:
- Built-in XML messaging support
- The LIMS must be able to import and export XML documents that reflect the hierarchical data relationships that will exist in the LIMS relational database
- The XML must abide by an XML Schema (XSD) such that applications can validate the XML content to assure it is properly formed and can interpret the meaning of the hierarchy within the XML document
- Data transport requires the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) messaging protocol to be used between the service provider and the service consumer
- Web Service Provider support
- The LIMS must have the ability to expose it's business services to the enterprise using a Web Services framework running from a compliant Web Server environment such as a J2EE Web Server
- Web Service Consumer support
- The LIMS must have the ability to consume Web Services offered by other enterprise applications or B2B services
- The LIMS must be scalable and able to consume more than one Web Service within its architecture
- All Web Services functionality that the LIMS provides must be described using a properly constructed WSDL (Web Service Description Language file) so that other applications can understand how to properly form any calls made into the Web Service
Dynamic Web Services
LabWare cannot possibly envision all of the many ways that our customers will want to use our Web Services capabilities. To realize the full potential of Enterprise Application Integration using Web Services, LabWare has empowered our customers to be able to create Dynamic Web Services within the LabWare WebLIMS environment. LabWare Administrators can design a subroutine using LabWare's powerful scripting environment called LIMS Basic, and then selectively choose which routines to expose via the Web Service. LabWare LIMS will automatically create the WSDL for your web method so that the consuming application or development tool will understand the method's function prototype or signature. Administrators have full control over what data types are required as arguments and what the web method should return upon successful execution of the web method. Dynamic Web Services enable a limitless number of ways that two applications can interact via Web Services.
Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)
Businesses are increasing looking at Services Oriented Architectures to be able to more effectively utilize Web Services within the enterprise in a more robust, scalable, and in disconnected integration scenarios. Ordinary Web Services may have been designed for a custom point-to-point solution and may never have been architected to work in an SOA. LabWare and IBM have worked closely together in a partnership to ensure that LabWare's Web Services can plug and play in an SOA environment where systems interoperate in loosely coupled and disconnected scenarios. Customers can be assured that LabWare LIMS can provide Web Services that conform to the most current industry standards such as XML, SOAP, and WSDL, and can be utilized in a scalable and robust heterogeneous computing environment. |