IMS GLC: General Web Services Specification

General Web Services

IMS General Web Services Final Specification
The General Web Services Base Profile promotes interoperability for web service based specification implementations on different software and vendor platforms. The Base Profile focuses on a core set of web service specifications and the most common problems experienced implementing the identified web service specifications. It is not a goal of the General Web Services Base Profile to create a plug-and-play architecture for web services or to guarantee complete interoperability. The General Web Services Base Profile addresses interoperability in the application layer, in particular, the description of behaviors exposed via Web Services.

The General Web Service Base Profile is derived from the Web Services Interoperability Basic Profile v1.1 and the Web Services Interoperability Simple SOAP Binding Profile v1.0. The IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC) recommendations for the General Web Service Base Profile are to adopt:

XML Schema V1.0 - all data models in IMS specifications will be defined in terms of XML Schema (XSD);
HTTP V1.1 - the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the mandated protocol binding for the SOAP messages;
SOAP V1.1 - SOAP is the mandated messaging protocol;
WSDL V1.1 - an instance of the service is defined using Web Services Description Language (WSDL) v1.1.

The General Web Service Base Profile can be extended by the adoption of one or more support General Web Service profiles. Other IMS General Web Service documents describe profiles for Addressing (transport-neutral web service addressing), Attachments (sending non-XML documents with the SOAP messages) and Security (secure data exchange).

In principle, the SOAP-based binding for the web services supports many communications messaging models (the Information Model for an IMS GLC specification is defined independently of the messaging nature, i.e., this is determined by the form of the Web Services Description Language binding). At the current time only one messaging model is supported:

Synchronous - this is a request/response message exchange in which the service initiator is blocked until the response message is received

Further messaging models will be added as and when required, i.e., asynchronous, polled, and publish and subscribe. There are three methods by which the functional capability of the base profile can be extended:

Addition of new SOAP messages - the addition of new business transactions and the usage of new messaging models requires the creation of new SOAP messages;
Extensions to the SOAP header - the current IMS General Web Service Base Profile makes use of the SOAP header to contain the application-to-application transaction status information. It is recommended that proprietary extensions to the SOAP header maintain the current usage patterns;
Extensions in the data contained within the SOAP body - the SOAP body contains the XML instance that is used to represent the parameters defined for the transaction operations in the specification. There may be a need to add new parameters or to extend the XML structures of the current parameters.

IMS General Web Services Specification - Version 1 Final Specification - HTML

IMS General Web Services Specification - Version 1 Final Specification - XSLs and Examples

Auto-Generation v.6 Files
Updated June 2005 to Auto-Generation v.6