Web Services GENius integrates directly with your Gen Encyclopedia so that any existing screen, server, or action block can be exposed as a Web Service. This enables existing functionality at any level of granularity, to be quickly customised and exposed as a Web Service for direct external consumption by mobile or web apps.

Web Services created with Web Services GENius require no change to your existing Gen applications. This key feature means that proven application functionality can be confidently deployed as Web Services, and existing Gen applications remain unchanged. This means that application data integrity is maintained, and costly regression testing is avoided. Especially for large and complex applications, this capability means that ongoing application support and service availability is not put at risk, when developing and delivering new mobile capability.

The required responsiveness of today’s Mobile apps is underpinned by the use of RESTful Web Services – which Web Services GENius exposes directly from your Gen applications. However, many existing internal integrations within an organisation continue to rely upon SOAP Web services, and these are also supported. Either or both of RESTful and SOAP Web Services can be created from each Web Service definition, and they are separately configured and automatically created.

Web Services GENius provides Gen developers the capability to create Web Services whilst insulating them from the range of new technology that RESTful and SOAP Web services are implemented with. This enables your existing development teams to work together quickly and collaboratively to deliver for your business.

Configuration details for your site, can be over-ridden by those specified at the model level, and like the configuration for your site, model configuration is specified as a set of properties against the model. Further, the target generation libraries/folders are defined at the model level, providing both the ability to share, and to segregate the artefacts created by Web Services GENius. Model configuration properties, once defined for one model, can be simply dragged and dropped against any other model.

Any Procedure Step or Action Block can be exposed as a Web Service. Multiple Web Services can be exposed over the same Gen object and can be migrated between models.

The action block Import attributes can be configured and customized to form the Web Service request, whilst the export attributes comprise the Web Services response. Each attribute can be removed from the interface (OMIT), or over-ridden (FIXED), or passed through (VARIABLE).

The properties pane of the Web Service is where the name and URI locator is specified for your Web Service, which incorporates both the URI address for the SOAP service, and the RESTful API.

Once you are satisfied with the definition of your Web Service interface, it can be generated and deployed ready for use. The way that the generation operates is slightly different depending upon whether a Host Encyclopedia or Client Server Encyclopedia is in use at your site.