Introduction to Web Services

A number of web service layers are able to run on top of Hydstra. The services can be run in-house for business processes, or externally from outside the firewall. Please contact us if you are interested in providing Hydstra information to other business consumers.

We support REST (Representational State Transfer), SOAP (originally Simple Object Access Protocol), and KiWIS (KISTERS Web Interoperability Solution).

•     HYDLLP can be directly linked as a DLL library into any process that can directly see the network drive where Hydstra is installed. There is no additional licencing required for internal processes to call HYDLLP. We provide examples of how to call HYDLLP from Perl, JavaScript. Delphi, C++ and other languages.

•     You can run REST and SOAP web services in-house which can be called by other service based products. You will need a Hydstra/WSI licence (WSI stands for Web Services Internal), and you will need to configure a Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) server to provide the service. Using Hydstra/WSI you can call either low level Hydstra HYDLLP calls or the higher level Public Hydstra abstraction that provides standard parameter names, units and quality codes.

•     If you need to provide the REST and SOAP services on a public facing web site you will need to replicate your Hydstra system through the firewall using a product such as Syncovery. As well as a Hydstra/WSI licence you will need additional Hydstra/TS licences to support the external service. If everyone configures Public Hydstra for public consumption then data consumers across the world should be able to access data from any Hydstra publisher in a standard way.

•     The KISTERS Web Interoperability Solution (KiWIS) runs over Hydstra/WSI, and can be purchased in addition to publish a variety of international standard services including WFS (Web Feature Service) , WMS (Web Map Service), WOF (Water One Flow from CUAHSI), SOS2 (Sensor Observation Service) and KiQS (Kisters Query Service). Much of Australia's water data is already available on World Water Online via the BOM's web site Water Data Online.

•     If you already have a Hydstra/WEB licence then Hydstra/WSI is already bundled with it.

It is worth noting in passing that for in-house business systems that need direct access to Hydstra time-series and metadata, another approach is to use SQL to access data from Hydstra metadata tables, and the Hydstra/ODBC product to make SQL calls over Hydstra time-series files.

Please contact KISTERS Australia for pricing on the various options and products we have discussed above.