| Klixo Web Services Framework |  |
Klixo Web Services Framework
The past couple of weeks I've been developing the Klixo Web Services Framework (KWSF). This is a project that fits somewhere in between our current Klixo content management system (KCMS) and our next version. We've been working away at providing web services to KCMS for a few months now with the ultimate aim of allowing all of the current ability of the KCMS interface to be effected using web services (plus a few more too).
So what does the KWSF do? At this stage it is very simple but a very useful tool in developing an alternative front-end to the KCMS. The basic concept is quite simple; if you're using the KWSF you're creating/reading/updating and deleting new data. On the web this is a <form>. So, what you want to do is take that form data and either create, read, update or delete data from the database. The first thing the system does is convert the from post/get data into an appropriate XML document as specified by the web service. If you use the Klixo naming conventions this is a single call to the KWSF but of course you can manipulate any of the elements of the XML request as required (as long as they are consistent with the web service you wish to call). Then you need to make the call to the appropriate webservice with the request you've just generated; again a single call.
Of course, you can make as many calls as you like and the KWSF simple accumulates the responses in a single document. When you've finished you can access the document and extract information or manipulate it as required. But most of the time you'll be wanting to simply convert all that XML you've acquired into an (X)HTML document which again is a single call. This is just the beginning but it's already proving very useful and significantly reducing development time - we're starting to use it on our own KCMS front-end and it makes life easy.
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