A Consultant's View
Prairie Trail Software, Inc. ..................................................... April 2004
Web What’s? Web Services. The World Wide Web keeps on changing. At first it was just a way for academics to pass files around. Then, they added the USENET news groups where people can post messages. Then, email was added. Then, all the web pages and browsers were added. The latest addition is something called “web services”.
A web services is an application on one machine connected to the web. This application is designed to let another computer on the web start it and run some functions. In essence, any computer on the web can make this specific computer perform some business actions and it can be done from anywhere around the world. Web services provide a standard way of doing this remote action.
What makes these interesting are that companies are setting up these “web services” to run financial and other transactions. For example, some banks are setting then up to allow other companies to transfer money. Other companies allow orders to be placed, invoices sent, payroll information transfered, and customer job status checked on. Many of these “web services” are moving transactions from paper to electronic. Many others are adding new transactions which would not have been done on paper.
We’ve run into a couple of cases now where people want to have a terminal talk to a web service. They want to do this from a terminal which is not IP based already. Instead, they want a simple terminal (such as the tranz 330) to dial up and perform the transaction over the web to that service.
We’ve done it.
How does that actually work? The Tranz 330 terminal is not capable of talking to the net. What happens is that the tranz 330 dials up a host like it normally would. Once the host has answered and received the request, that host program turns around and sends that request to the IP address on the web. The host program (which can be running on a PC) connects the tranz 330 to a web service. Once the web service has responded, the host program sends the response back to the terminal.
We have made systems where a terminal can dial up and get a transaction run via a “web service”. We have also built “web services” for others. If you want either one, give us a call for more details. For more information, give us a call.
Dave Randolph,
President, Prairie Trail Software
1-800-618-4199