Playing Well With OthersUsing Web Services For Interoperability and Content Interchange

Dmitriy Babichenko, Teppituk Krinchai, James B. McGee Laboratory for Educational TechnologyUniversity of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

Take a look at the following 3 websites…

Let’s take a closer look…

Now take a look at Amazon

What is so special about Facebook and Amazon?

Web Service Infrastructure

What Are Web Services?

o Web services are application components

o Web services communicate using open protocols

o Web services are self-contained o Web services are self-describing

o Web services can be used by other applications

Implementation

o Well-supported by most modern programming languages

o Use XML to pass data

o Low implementation cost

Example

Dim ws As New vpSim.externalDataAccess Dim link As String = ws.generatePlayerLink(userName, userPassword, learnerUserID, learnerFirstName, learnerLastName, learnerEmail, caseID) Response.Write("<a href='" & link & "' target='_blank'>" & link & "</a>")

Why should you care?

Imagine a system infrastructure where a student logs into a web portal…

…and sees a calendar that aggregates data from Microsoft Exchange, Learning Management System (LMS) and portal events…

…where a single blog application can be implemented in multiple web systems…

… and a learning module can launch a virtual patient simulation…

… and a virtual patient simulation can send a student performance report to any LMS

Lab for Educational Technology Web Application Infrastructure

Navigator LMS

Microsoft SharePoint Web

Portal

Virtual Patient Simulator

Clinical Log

Blog

Questions?

Dmitriy BabichenkoLaboratory for Educational TechnologyUniversity of Pittsburgh School of Medicinedmitriy@medschool.pitt.edu