Web Services for K-12 Education Systems
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Web Services (WS) are now a reality for many enterprises and have moved beyond the hype stage. Many enterprises have built Web Services pilot projects, proving that WS can reduce integration and development cost substantially and enhance customer and supplier integration. This article will walk you through the Web Service development process using PHP, MySQL, VB, NuSOAP or XML-RPC. Before going further, you can download and install the client (the example, discussed in this article) from here and start playing with it for a better understanding the topics of this article.To explain the Web service development process, imagine an educational test service example: Company ABC Inc. has enjoyed tremendous success as a test item developer and computer based testing (CBT) service provider. To support its business with different independent school districts (ISDs) across North America, the company created a unique application for assessment of knowledge and skill of students. This is an extremely complex problem with over 100,000 test items, different state specifications and test reports based on ethnicity, government program, socio-economic category and many other sub categories.
The management of ABC Inc. realizes that their software application and test items are valuable assets that could be made even more valuable if it were transformed into a Web service. Web Service technology offers ABC Inc. the ability to transform its property software application and state specific test items and tutorials into a reusable, modular, self-contained service that could be used by new ISDs, regardless of their underlying infrastructure. Third party dealers simply would have to know how to find and interact with the service according to their needs and state specifications.
By following the steps of the Web Service Development Process, company ABC can revolutionize the way it does business with educational services by offering quick and easy interaction with the new educational testing services. ABC must advertise it so that potential ISDs and software dealers can find it and interact with it, which is done by adding an entry to a Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI).
This article will step you through one of the many educational services offered by fictitious ABC Inc. using PHP, MySQL, XML all of which are open source and free. In addition, the software will run on an Apache platform, giving you an end-to-end open source experience
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