Millennium by Harms Software designed the Millennium Software Development Kit (SDK) for the following reasons:
To provide methods for safely accessing the Millennium database from external applications using this predefined SDK.
To make the SDK available from anywhere on the customer's network (or via the Internet) so that it will work with other applications - including web sites.
To make the SDK easy to implement by exposing the interface as web services - defined by WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and accessed via SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) messages.
To provide tracking and performance monitoring information via log files.
To allow multithreaded processing that improves throughput.
To implement a layer of security that allows a client to specify the features available.
The Millennium SDK Web Services are a collection of methods and functions that accept a SOAP message, process the request against the Millennium database, and return the results in a SOAP response message. Following are examples of these methods:
Inquiry - read the details of a single record (get…)
List - retrieve a list of records (get…list)
Update - make changes to the Millennium database (put…)
Add - create new records in the Millennium database (add…)
The Millennium SDK comprises of several components:
Web service that houses the Millennium SDK features and functions.
WSDL (Web Services Description Language) that describes the services available and provides a mechanism for generating client access code.
Soap Headers that carry generic information to all web service calls
Following is a quick summary of how the Millennium SDK Web Service works:
The client produces a SOAP message and posts it to the web server.
Millennium SDK interprets the request and starts the appropriate function.
The Millennium SDK Web Service accepts the data from the request and passes it to the appropriate function.
The function processes the request and sends an output data set back to the Millennium SDK Web Service as an XML stream.
The Millennium SDK Web Service produces a SOAP response back to the calling procedure.
This is the recommended communication protocol to use when accessing the Millennium SDK.