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paulopinheiro1234 edited this page Nov 2, 2012 · 4 revisions

The visualization pipelines constructed by VisKo are composed of Web services. This page describes the implications of this service oriented approach as well as some benefits.

Implications of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Most visualization toolkits such as Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Generic Mapping Tools (GMT), and NCAR Command Language (NCL) are standalone sets of libraries or executables that by default are not available as Web services.

The means that if you want to register a specific functionality from one of the aforementioned toolkits, it is up to you to write the service code that wraps the toolkit functionality and exposes it as a Web service. In some cases, this means that your service must invoke an executable, as is the case with GMT that is available only as a set of binary executables.

Benefits of SOA

  • language independent invocations
  • lower software development and management costs
  • scalability that may not be possible on a single machine

Challenges of SOA

  • Not intuitive for users of visualization toolkits to perceive how toolkit functionalities can be exposed as web services
  • Technically demanding the task of developing, testing and deploying services exposing toolkit functionalities