This article was originally posted on our RPG-XML Suite product website.
The RPG-XML Suite API was designed from the ground up to allow the IBM i web services developer to perform all the tasks commonly encountered in a web services environment. Composing, parsing and transmitting XML to potentially thousands of web services gives the IBM i developer powerful capabilities that can’t possibly be achieved on a standalone server. So while it’s easy to recognize the power that web services can bring to the IBM i, the developer needs a flexible API like RPG-XML Suite to enable the RPG language and the rock-solid IBM i architecture to tap into all that power.
Spend some time searching the internet and you will likely uncover numerous toolkits and API’s for the IBM i that attempt to address one or more of the major faucets of web services, but RPG-XML Suite is unique in the broad support it provides for creating a fully functional web service processing platform within a single API. The RPG-XML Suite API is designed to be consistent across all the facets of web services so that you can code solutions without jumping in and out of various API’s that were never really intended to work with one another. This unified API design will limit the amount of training required and enables faster development.
Some other toolsets and API’s focus on consuming web services. Others are geared towards offering web services that will be consumed. So why do you have to use different toolsets or API’s for consuming versus offering? The answer is that you don’t. RPG-XML Suite was designed for both and the RPG code for each is very similar thanks to the unified design of the API.
Because RPG-XML Suite is implemented as an API, rather than as some type of framework or development environment, the developer has much more power to customize solutions for accessing a wide variety of web services. Often times RPG-XML Suite will have flexibility that other solutions can’t achieve because they simply can’t adapt to the requirements or can’t integrate in the same way as the RPG-XML Suite API.