Web services really works

I got a nice surprise the other day from one of our support engineers. He's really getting into Ruby as a scripting language and has used it to automated several of his processes, like managing backups, upgrading multiple BDS instances at once, and other tedious system administration tasks.

But then he thought about using Ruby to script BDS. In the matter of a few hours, he was able to take the BDS web services API and generate the ruby methods using wsdl2ruby, and created a script to authenticate and start sending files securely through our production delivery server.

One of the big hopes of Web services when it was first developed, was to create a truly interoperable middleware technology for applications to share data. Because it's simply passing XML-based SOAP messages around, it's language neutral -- if you can read and write SOAP messages, you can leverage applications that support SOA with Web services interfaces, like Biscom Delivery Server. Luckily, more and more development environments are including built-in support for Web services, or at the very least, have pre-built libraries, tools, and other third-party add-ons to connect to Web services out in the cloud.

So, for all you programmers and scripting aficionados, see how you can extend your existing and legacy applications to support secure file transfer using our Web services API. If you have an idea or a question about integrating BDS capabilities into your organization, let us know -- we'll help you any way we can.