Web Services Reference for Oracle Billing Insight > Overview of Web Services >

About Oracle Billing Insight Web Services

Oracle Billing Insight Web services provide a programmatic interface over the Web that developers and system integrators can use to build applications to integrate with Oracle Billing Insight applications.

A Web service is a discrete piece of business logic, accessible through Internet protocols, that allows businesses to communicate with each other and with other clients, without detailed knowledge of each other's IT systems.

Figure 1 shows how Web services interact with a user and the Oracle Billing Insight database.

Figure 1. Web Services Communication with Oracle Billing Insight

The user communicates with Oracle Billing Insight over the Internet using HTTP and HTTPS requests. Oracle Billing Insight Web services use the Java API for RESTful Web services (JAX-RS) Specification.JAX-RS is a Java programming language API that provides support for creating Web services according to the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style.

The Web services APIs allow you to build programs to integrate with Oracle Billing Insight. Some common examples of client integrations include the following:

• Web-based portal applications. You can create customized Web-based applications, using Active Server Pages (ASPs), Java Server Pages (JSPs), or similar Web technologies that access Oracle Billing Insight through a Web services interface. For example, a portal site can create a portlet that invokes the Oracle Billing Insight Web services APIs to get a billing account summary or display the billing trend for the current user.
• Native mobile applications. Your native mobile applications can invoke Oracle Billing Insight Web services to perform functions, such as retrieving account balances and returning analytic reports. All Oracle Billing Insight Web services can be invoked by mobile applications.
• CRM, provisioning, and back-office applications. You can request a provisioning service to create companies, accounts, or services. The provisioning system can then call Oracle Billing Insight Web services to create those business objects in the Oracle Billing Insight application, which allows users to view their service information immediately. Similarly, an account receivable system that received a payment from a customer for an account could call an Oracle Billing Insight Web service to update the account balance in Oracle Billing Insight, enabling a user to view her updated account balance immediately.
• Add-on read operations. You can extend Oracle Billing Insight functionality to add additional reports that query data from Oracle Billing Insight database tables or any customized or additional database tables. These reports can be configured and function as part of the RESTful Web services.

Oracle Billing Insight provides a separate EAR file with Web-services functionality, which you deploy on a separate application server.