Introduction to SSC Programming Interfaces
This section describes the Application Program Interfaces (APIs), that third party applications can use to access SunSystems Connect ( SSC). It is aimed at developers; it does not go into any detail about the standard interfaces used. For more information see Resources and References.
SSC provides a way for applications and integrations to transfer data into and out from SunSystems. This enables systems to combine elements of SunSystems with third party or bespoke systems to provide an enterprise-wide solution.
SSC is primarily designed to support tight integration between software objects running in real-time (as opposed to pure integration products like Microsoft Biztalk). It provides the SOAP interface and the WSDL interface.
SOAP Interface
The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a widely deployed standard for calling remote methods. It is implemented on a wide variety of platforms and is now supported by most languages.
The SSC SOAP implementation takes advantage of the streaming nature of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to execute SOAP methods ad hoc, making SOAP a good solution for processing large amounts of data.
From SunSystems version 5.2.2 onwards, the SSC server provides a pair of SOAP endpoints, which are identical apart from levels of security. By default, a secure interface using the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) appears on port 8443, while an unencrypted interface appears on port 8080.
WSDL Interface
The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is an information service that describes available web services. SSC provides a dynamically generated WSDL service that describes the SOAP interface for all components.
You can use this service to configure SOAP clients. For example, you can use Microsoft Developer Studio.NET to automatically generate proxy components from the WSDL document.