US 9,961,154 B1Granted

Web service gateway

AssigneeState Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company

InventorsBradley David Kemp, Larry Gregory Turilli, Tracey Ann Boll, Matthew Stephen Ayers

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Abstract

A web service gateway provides a single web service API to host applications for accessing any web service. The single web service API may be available across all host execution environments; facilitate client service by handling target service addresses and security credentials; avoid significant new training for existing host application developers; and be a low-cost addition to existing infrastructure. The web service gateway supports multiple execution domains and multiple test environments. The present embodiments may (1) enable an organization with skilled host application programmers to leverage a simple pattern for invoking SOA web services consistently throughout all host applications using a familiar API; (2) allow for flexibility by handling differences across execution domains outside the source code, thereby freeing the developers from a requirement of network topology knowledge; and/or (3) provide secure communications, and add only limited incremental infrastructure hardware to most existing enterprise computing environments.

Claims18

Dependent claims

A computer-implemented web service gateway system comprising:

a host application execution environment including one or more processors, a memory configured to store and execute one or more host applications, and a gateway interface configured to receive a gateway copybook input from one of the host applications, the gateway copybook including at least:
control data for connecting the one of the host applications to a web service;
return codes accepted by the one of the host applications;
input data including a pointer identifying a memory location where a request structure copybook resides, the memory location where the request structure copybook resides being a different location from a memory location where the gateway copybook resides;
and
output data including a pointer identifying a memory location where a response structure copybook resides, the memory location where the response structure copybook resides being different from the memory location where the gateway copybook resides;
wherein a gateway program is configured to receive the gateway copybook from the gateway interface via a network and to invoke a proxy web service with a request using the request structure copybook, the proxy web service being configured to map data from the request structure copybook to web protocol format data;
wherein the proxy web service is configured to invoke a target web service with the web protocol format data;
and
wherein the gateway program is further configured to return a response to the gateway interface, the response to the gateway interface being based on a response that (i) the gateway program receives from the proxy web service, and (ii) uses the response structure copybook.

7 more elements

A method for managing host application web service client requests, the method including:

natively calling a gateway interface from a host application;
submitting target web service request data in a request structure copybook to a gateway interface via a pointer in a gateway copybook to the request structure copybook, wherein the gateway copybook includes at least:
control data from connecting the host application to a web service;
return codes accepted by the host application;
input data including the pointer to the request structure copybook, the pointer to the request structure copybook identifying a memory location where the request structure copybook resides, and the memory location where the request structure copybook resides being a different location from a memory location where the gateway copybook resides;
and
output data including a pointer identifying a memory location where a response structure copybook resides, the memory location where the response structure copybook resides being different from the memory location where the gateway copybook resides;
transferring, via a network, the gateway copybook from the gateway interface to a gateway program executing on a transaction server;
storing, in one or more containers, the target web service request data that was submitted in the request structure copybook;
transmitting the one or more containers from the transaction server to a proxy web service to invoke the proxy web service;
mapping, via the proxy web service, the target web service data in the one or more containers into web service protocol format;
submitting target web service request data according to the web service protocol format to a target web service to facilitate managing host application web service client requests;
and
returning a response from the gateway program to the gateway interface, the response to the gateway interface being based on a response that (i) the gateway program receives from the proxy web service, and (ii) uses the response structure codebook.

11 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.