ACE Computational Web Services

ACE computational Web Services gives users inside and outside of your organization controlled access to computational applications over Intranet and Internet. With ACE Computational Web Services, developers can easily host their computational applications as services. Users access the services via Web browsers or customized GUIs and APIs, and therefore ACE services are readily available to just about anyone who has a computer connected to the network.

In an enterprise environment, the Web-enabled computational services, can drive a variety of underlying computational software packages or in-house codes. Thus ACE allows your enterprise to capture the experience and knowledge that your specialists have in applying complex software, and to deploy across your network.

Key Features

• Standards based and easily integrated with other enterprise applications and systems
• Highly customizable and configurable to tailor to your specific needs
• Platform and programming language independent for both clients and services
• Convenient authoring tools and libraries that facilitate easy client access.
• Central repository and consolidated storage of computational results
• Scheduling system that efficiently make use of your software licenses and computing resources.
• Low band width requirement for minimum amount of information exchanged between a user's computer and the service.

The core of ACE computational Web services is the SOAP protocol and universal computing standards (e.g. Optimization Services Protocol) for information exchange.

From an ACE architecture view, a user constructs a computing or modeling application in any language (e.g. Visual Basic). The purpose of the application is to call, as a client, a remote ACE computational Web service on the network, again written in any language (e.g. Java). The client’s VB structure is serialized (that is transformed from binary to ASCII) through a SOAP client and into a SOAP message. The SOAP message is then transmitted via the network to the remote computational service. At the remote end, the SOAP message is deserialized from its ASCII XML form into a binary Java structure, before the computational service executes the request call. A response is returned in the same way.

From an ACE network protocol view, all the information needed for the client call is stored in a SOAP envelope. Within the SOAP message all the model and computation information are represented in universal computing standards such as Optimization Services standards. A SOAP envelope is usually packed inside an HTTP protocol. From that point on, the HTTP packet is transmitted over a TCP/IP transport the same way that an HTTP request for a Web page is transmitted.