Visual Environment for Supply Chain Integration Using Web Services

Abstract

This chapter presents a software tool to simplify application integration among enterprises. The visual environment provides facilities to display in a graphical interface the structure of databases and applications. By clicking in the appropriate tables, functions, and fields, enterprises could specify the data sources needed for integration. The details of the applications are extracted from WSDL and metadata definitions. Once the fields for every access are specified, integration code is automatically generated in either Java or C#. The chapter describes the visual tool and its use for automatic supply chain integration from metadata or WSDL descriptions. It describes how users specify the data elements and the integration links and how the code integrating the specified elements is automatically generated. The generated code uses Web services standards to integrate the specified sources.