8
Calendar Web Services Toolkit Overview

This chapter provides an overview of Oracle Calendar web services and the web services toolkit.

Related documents:

• IETF iCal RFC http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt
• Web Services Activity http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/
• Web Services Description Language (WSDL) http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl
• Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1 http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/

About Web Services

Oracle Calendar web services is a component of the Oracle Calendar application system, which handles application level services. Web services allows applications to retrieve, through common XML queries, calendaring data for display in any portal, client application, or backend server. iCal data is coded in XML, wherein iCal becomes xCal. SOAP is used to encapsulate the messages for delivery. The calendaring data web services SOAP is stored directly on the Calendar Server store. This is in effect the CWSL, or Calendar web services Language.

Oracle Calendar web services is comprised of three main areas. The first is SOAP, providing the communication protocol by which a client and server exchange "objects" over HTTP. The second is the Web service Description Language (WSDL), with which third-party integrators can query the Web Service for a description of its functionality (similar to IDL). The final element of web services is the registry where a Web Service can be published and located by a client. This element is known as Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI).

This current implementation does not provide any WSDL or UDDI support. However, future versions may provide the ability to publish WSDL to a UDDI registry.

The Web Services Toolkit

Developers can use the Oracle Calendar web services toolkit to build web services applications and create SOAP 1.1 queries. The toolkit contains the functionality to search, create, modify, and delete calendar events, as well as search tasks. It gives SOAP access to the calendar server database through a series of Java classes, known as the Calendarlet. This allows developers to use a Java IDE, abstracting the XML structure required to build applications.

Use the Calendarlet to create your own clients and integrate calendaring data into your own applications. To integrate calendaring data within any portal, client application, or backend server, you need to be able to make an HTTP connection to the web server hosting web services, generate SOAP messages and parse the SOAP responses (using any technology that can send and receive HTTP strings), and make use of an existing XML toolkit to generate outgoing and parse incoming HTTP strings with a SOAP client toolkit. The toolkit supports the use of HTTP proxies.

Toolkit Contents

The Oracle Calendar web services toolkit includes:

• Calendarlet.tar: The calendarlet JAR file.
• Javadoc.tar: The Javadoc HTML documentation for the calendarlet.
• Ws_testtool.tar: The Java source for the calendar web services toolkit testing tool, including sample source code.

Security

• BasicAuth
  • Uses plain text userIDs and passwords
  • Should configure HTTP Server for SSL, if the Calendar is to be available outside a "trusted" environment
  • Requires a master-node Calendar Server configuration

All authentication is performed by the calendar server. The Java-side classes use web services to pass the information without performing any action on them. However, security information must be set within the Java web services classes in order to authenticate.