CDAS Web Services
The Coordinated Data Analysis System (CDAS) Web services allow a software
developer to use CDAS services in their own application. If you are
not a software developer and simply want to use the existing web interface
to CDAS, then return to the
main CDAWeb page.
Description
CDAS supports simultaneous multi-mission, multi-instrument selection and
comparison of science data among a wide range of current space missions.
While CDAWeb provides access to this data through an HTML-based user interface,
these Web services provides a distributed programming interface to CDAS.
If you are developing an application that requires science data from
any of the data sets held by CDAS, then the CDAS Web services will provide
an interface to the data for your application. Higher level Web services
that perform additional processing of the data are expected to be added
in the near future. The following describes how to utilize these
Web services from your own application.
Software Development Kit (SDK)
The CDAS Web services SDK consists of instructions and a library to allow
a developer to utilize the CDAS Web services. The SDK is
described here and may be
downloaded here.
WSDL
The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is an XML language for describing
Web services. The WSDL describing the CDAS Web services is available
at the following URL:
-
http://cdaweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/WS/jaxrpc?WSDL
Note: Depending upon your browser's XML capabilities and how
it handles an XML file that doesn't contain any style information, you
may need to use the browser's "view source" option to view the WSDL in
the browser. Recent versions of Internet Explorer and Mozilla will
have no problem displaying the WSDL. Alternately, you may force the
browser to save the WSDL file (target of link) and view it using another
application. The file should be viewable in a simple text editor.
Other useful Web service description information is available at this URL
JavaTM API
While the Web services are accessible from any language/run-time that support
the Web services interface described by the above WSDL, the CDAS Web services
SDK contains a Java class library to simplify using the CDAS Web services
from a Java client. The description of this API is included in the
SDK download file but may also be viewed online at the following link:
This library was developed using JAX-RPC and is included in the SDK described
above.
SDK Download
The CDAS Web services SDK may be downloaded from
here.
Examples
The following are examples of client applications that utilize the CDAS XML
Web services.