Overview for Scientists

InstantSOAP is a tool which enables scientists to publish their code, command-line applications or other computational tools, to share them so that others can benefit from their work.

Tools such as Taverna enable scientist to connect together tools provided by others, building complex workflows, without having to worry about the details of distributed programming or Web services.

InstantSOAP provides the same facilities to the scientist who wishes to publish their code, tools or other resources as services, so that others can use them, within Taverna or directly over the web. InstantSOAP can be used to publish command-line applications, Java code or programs produced in other languages, without the developer or owner of the resource having to worry about distributed programming.

Overview for Developers

For those more worried about the control of how their service is published:

• InstantSOAP supports both synchronous and asynchronous interactions.
• The code base is high configurable, with both the service presentation and underlying invocation framework being pluggable.
• New services can be added using either a web form, or built as a maven artifact.
• The product is a Web archive (WAR) file which can be installed easily in Tomcat or other container, with ease.

Where next?

If you just want to try InstantSOAP, try our 10 Minute Introduction : A very rapid fly through installing a service and running it in two ways. Alternatively, if you want to publish a service, the following documentation is available:

• Service in Java : A quick guide to writing a service in Java
• A Full Example : A more complete example of publishing a service.
• Developers guide to services in Java : A more detailed guide, describing many options for publishing a service.
• Exposing Command-Line Applications : if you wish to publish an application which runs through the command line.
• Feature List : if you wish to read in more detail about the features.

• Commandline Client: Describes a simple commandline client you can use.
• A Java Client: Describes how to build a client in Java, which you could use from different applications.
• Developers Guide to Clients: Describes the full details of building a client.
• Low Level Client: Describes a very ugly client that interacts using XML messages. It's very simple however, and should be portable to any language.