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:

1. 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.

2. 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).

   • The sscWebServicesJaxWs-client.jar file is available for download in the SSC Web services SDK.

3. Start the IDL environment.

4. Compile the WsExample.pro program.

5. 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.).