Oracle WebCenter Content (formerly UCM) has been a pioneer in
Services Oriented Architecture long before the term took on the meaning it has
in today’s technical realm (e.g. Web Services, UDDI, WSDL, SOAP, XML). Since the introduction of the Intradoc 4.x release
as a Java application back in late 1999 early 2000, the platform has been
making its content management services (a.k.a. IdcService) accessible over Http
protocol.
When the concept of Services Oriented Architecture turned to the meaning it has today with Web Services, UDDI, WSDL, SOAP, and XML, the Oracle UCM platform followed suit in its 7.x release by making its idcServices available to Web Service clients by publishing a set of WSDL’s that were packaged and released with the product for its core services like CHECKIN_NEW, DOC_INFO, GET_SEARCH_RESULTS, etc. In addition to a set of pre-packaged WSDL’s there was also a WSDL generator that provided the ability to create and publish WSDL’s for any custom server that was developed using Component Architecture. Information on this version of Web Service implementation is available in section 25 of the WebCenter Content developers guide located at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/doc.1111/e10807/c25_wsdl_and_soap.htm
The core WSDL’s and WSDL generator are still packaged and deployed
with Oracle WebCenter Content 11g, however when Oracle WebCenter Content
11g was released a new set of Web Service interfaces became available which are
deployed as Web Applications on Oracle WebLogic Server. The two new Web Service implementations that
became available with WebCenter content 11g are:
Generic Web Service - A JAX-WS Web Service implementation whose application context root
is /idcws and publishes a single Web Service provider interface
GenericSoapService. Use of this Web Service
provider is targeted for development of Web Service proxy clients implemented
in your development platform of choice (e.g. java, .NET, .NET#, etc) whose
proxy stubs are constructed from the WSDL published from
/idcws/GenericSoapPort?WSDL.
Native Web Service– A native SOAP based Web Service implementation whose application
context root is /idcnativews and publishes two Web Service provider interfaces
IdcWebRequestService and IdcWebLoginService. Use of these Web Service providers is targeted
specifically for the development of Web Service proxy clients implemented in
Java that embeds the Oracle WebCenter Content RIDC interface.
When I started this endeavor my intent was to publish it in its entirety as a blog post but then the breadth and depth of the topic quickly outgrew the length of a traditional blog post so I turned it into a technical article that is attached here. In addition to the article I have supplied a sample application that can be downloaded from here. Information on the sample application is provided in the article. For those of you who need to integrate with Oracle WebCenter Content 11g over a Web Service interface this article and sample application should give you a jump start on using the latest Web Services interfaces available on the Oracle WebCenter Content 11g platform.