Xydra - An automatic form generator for Web Services

Overview

Xydra is a library that uses servlet to provide XHTML based WSDL invoker. Xydra servlet takes WSDL with XML Schema complex types as input, generates XHTML form to allow user to fill content of input message, gathers submitted input values and converts form name-value pairs into XML message that is sent it to Web Service and then finally displays result message.

One could ask: there are other WSDL invokers so what makes Xydra unique? Here is couple reasons:

• Xydra has pluggable data model and currently two backend to represent form and XML message content One is traditional name-value pairs that are structured into tree (called TreePath) and second that is based on Protege engine to use ontology describing web service to allow more reach constraints and relationship validation (called OntoBrew).
• It is very easy to customize Xydra look and feel: just save auto-generated XHTML page, modify it to your needs and tell Xydra to use this XHTML page as template. What makes it really easy is that template is a regular XHTML page that is used by Xydra processing engine (unsurprisingly called Diesel) to annotate it with runtime information.
• Xydra support complex types and generate nice XHTML form UI for arbitrarily nested XHTML forms.
• You get source code so you can improve it :-)

Sample installation is available online to test drive Xydra. It is open source so anybody can play with it, improve it, and give us feedback, patches are gladly accepted, we may even fix some bugs when reported (good bug report that contains all information necessary to reproduce problem and/or unit test greatly increases chances of getting problem fixed ...)

Features

• Processes complex types, and nested complex types
• Processes simple types and restrictions on simple types.
• Uses templates to customize the form generation
• It is easily to integrate in portals because it use a REST architecture
• Supports multiple back-ends. Currently developed back-ends: TreePath and OntoBrew
• Validation for xsd:nil

Deployed Services

• Portal

Source code and JAR file

• Get it form Xydra repository

About

Xydra was designed and implemented by:

• Octav Chipara
• Alek Slominski

from Extreme Computing Lab.

For inquires, comments, request for enhancements and bugs please subscribe to our mailing list: http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/xgws-user