Web services is an emerging technology that provides programmatic interfaces on the network that are used for application to application communication. Web services allow users to integrate code from most platforms or languages with their application. The Web Services Package is a Mathematica Package that integrates Mathematica and web services by letting a user call web services from Mathematica in a completely transparent way. Mathematica users can dynamically access new data and functionality located on the network. The Web Services Package makes the whole universe of existing and future web services an automatic extension to the Mathematica environment.
Web Services runs on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and UNIX.
Please direct comments, questions, etc. to webservices@wolfram.com.
| 1.0.2 | 6/05 | Minor bug fixes. |
| 1.0.1 | 1/05 | Minor bug fixes. |
| 1.0.0 | 11/04 | Final 1.0.0 release. |
| 1.0.0b3 | 1/04 | Minor bug fixes regarding ExpressionML and MathML support. |
| 1.0.0b2 | 11/03 | Major upgrade with several internal fixes and some useful features. |
| 1.0.0b1 | 5/03 | First release. |
Moved $WebServicesSecurityInitialized symbol into the package context.
A bug was fixed in the XML parser that affected how the WSDL file was parsed within InstallService. This bug was common in web services implemented in .Net.
Fixed a bug in Deserialize that forced an ugly message and forced deserialization to fail. The problem occurred when a data type definition was not found. Data will be converted generically if a data type definition is not found. Simple data will become a string and complex data will become a rule.
Updated the Wolfram Search example to use Wolfram Search version 2.
Reorganized the package. This includes where some of the file are located and how the code loads. This fixes some problems with symbols clashing with other symbols.
Updated the TerraService example to use GUIKit.
Added Web Services Navigator example.
Fixed the semantics for using MathML with Web Services. The client will support sending MathML when a type is specified as math.type rather than just supporting a math element defined in the MathML Schema.
Fixed the semantics for using Expressions with Web Services. The client will support sending Expressions when a type is specified as Expression rather than just supporting a Expression element defined in the MathML Schema.
Updated Amazon examples to version 3. Version 1 is going offline.
Added support for ExpressionML. If a web service returns ExpressionML, the client will transform the data into an Expression automatically for the user.
Added InsecureExprQ function that helps ensure ExpressionML that is converted by the client is safe. A user used SetSecurity to specify allowed and disallowed symbols and contexts. This function returns True if a symbol is disallowed.
Added SetSecurity function that is used to specify which symbols and contexts are allowed and disallowed by InsecureExprQ.
Added ExpressionWrapperFunction option that allows the user to specify a function that will wrap each Expression that is created with ExpressionML returned from a web service operation. One use of this option is it provides the users with a way to use Hold on a Expression before it is evaluated.
Added support for MathML. If a web service returns MathML, the client will transform the data into Symbolic XML automatically for the user.
Removed support for the HeaderEncodingStyleURI option. Headers will use the encoding style used by the body. HeaderEncodingStyleURI did not scale properly as there could be multiple headers each with different encoding styles. Yet there was only one HeaderEncodingStyleURI option. WS-I profiles specifies that only literal encoding should be used. So really this should be the standard and there should be no need to specify the headers encoding style URI. However, encoding may still be used for the client, but only if the encoding matches the body's encoding.
Added DeencodeParameters option that is mostly an internal option. Parameters are encoded with their type and arrayType in order to identify the type and arrayType of parameters at runtime. For SOAP encoded messages, this is useful because these are required within the message. However, literal messages do not require these encodings to be in the message and they should not be sent to the service as it may cause iteroperability problems. Therefor the encodings must be removed after the types and arrayTypes are identified by the code building the message. By setting this option to True, the encodings are removed. By setting the option to False the encodings remain for messages that are SOAP encoded. This option is exposed to the user, as it may be useful while building a function using InstallServiceOperation.
Added support the elementFormDefault attribute in XML Schema definitions. Previous versions of the Web Services package were ignoring this attribute and not building messages correctly. For previous versions, if a service was document-style it used qualified elements, but if it rpc-style it used unqualified elements.
Fixed support for importing schema. Previous versions were not importing schema defined in the types section correctly. This should be fixed.
XML Schema
The entire XML Schema specification is not supported. There will be complex schema type definitions which will not work properly. This can be overcome by building the requests by hand using ToServiceRequest. More schema support will be added in the next version.
HTTP Requests
Timeouts may occur only after a lengthy wait. This occurs because the Java libraries that are used to make the HTTP requests only allow for the server to determine when the timeout occurs. So the client may wait for a longer period waiting than intended, waiting for the server to timeout. This will hopefully be addressed in future releases.