IDL SSC Web Services Example
The Satellite Situation Center (SSC) Web services allow a software
developer to use portions of the SSC software in their own application. The
following describes an example of how to utilize the SSC Web Services from
a client program written in the
Iteractive Data Language (IDL) programming language.
This example doesn't provide any useful, end-user functionality but is
intended merely as an example for developers of client applications to
examine.
Prerequisites
The following is required in order to execute the example program:
- IDL 6.4 or higher on a platform that supports the IDL-Java bridge.
- 6.0 is actually the minimum version but the IDL-Java bridge works
better in later versions.
- Refer to the IDL product documentation for the list of
supported platforms.
- Refer to the IDL product documentation for the procedure to
configure your IDL installation to support the IDL-Java
bridge feature. You must ensure that IDL is properly configured
to support the IDL-Java bridge.
- Java Standard Edition (SE) 6 (1.6) Runtime Environment (JRE) or
higher.
- Java SE 1.4.1 is actually the minimum version. However, if a
version of Java less than 1.6 is used, a lot of extra work is
required. A description of the extra work is beyond the scope
of this document.
- The SSC Web services SDK.
Example
The example IDL program is contained in the file
WsExample.pro. In order to
execute the program, save the
WsExample.pro file to your computer where IDL
is installed.
Instructions
The following instructions describe how to execute the example IDL
program:
- Follow the procedures for configuring the IDL-Java bridge
provided with the IDL software.
- The installation of IDL may automatically take care of all
configuration issues but it is worth verifying the configuration and
verifying that at least one of IDL-Java bridge examples provided with
IDL functions correctly. Refer to the IDL documentation
Programmer's Guides/IDL Connectivity Bridges/Importing Into IDL/Using
Java Objects in IDL/Initializing the IDL-Java Bridge.
- Include the
sscWebServicesJaxWs-client.jar
file in your CLASSPATH
. The specific procedure for
accomplishing this varies depending upon the development environment
(e.g., Unix or Microsoft windows) and the developer's preference (i.e.,
global environement variables or the idljavabrc
configuration file).
- Start the IDL environment.
- Compile the WsExample.pro program.
- Execute the WsExample procedure and compare the output with what
you expected from examining the IDL source code.
- Note that the example outputs both text (satellite and ground
station description information) and an
iPLOT
window (containing the 3D orbit plots). You should examine both
output destinations.
- This example doesn't provide any useful, end-user functionality
but is intended merely as an example for developers of client
applications. It doesn't allow a user to select the set of
satellites or enter a time range and no attempt was made to
make the plot pretty (e.g., labels, legends, etc.).