Axeda Web Services enable applications to interact with the platform. Presentation through an RIA makes use of Web Services to query asset data to display, or to control an asset. Business integrations use Web Services to synchronize information, manage trouble tickets, check entitlements, and many more.
There are two styles of web services available in the Axeda Platform. Languages that can consume WSDL, such as Java and C# and other .NET languages, can most easily import the WSDL files and generate classes that proxy the interface of the web services. By importing WSDL files, your code simply operates on objects without knowledge of the remote call going on in the background.
On the other hand, REST services are not described statically by WSDL files. REST services are just URLs with parameters, so they are easy to call from scripting languages. Since scripting languages are dynamically typed, they can better handle services without a static service definition. This is a perfect environment for calling Scripto, a REST service that calls a named groovy script. There is no way to have static WSDL describe a service that is implemented by a script you define. But scripting languages don't care, and they are great for calling an HTTP URL.
For either style of web service, authentication is provided by username and password, limiting services to only those resources the user has access to.
