Why?
HxGN EAM is a highly configurable application that is open for external integrations and interfaces with its 2800 Web Services. These Web Services have however often proven to be complex to use and have until recently only been available as SOAP Web Services.
The EAM WS Hub was developed at CERN to solve this by simplifying the most commonly used Web Service calls and providing both SOAP and REST Web Services. As only parameters that need to be updated are included in the call, no initial fetch call is needed, the payload can often be reduced with a factor 100 and the call is both easier to develop and faster to execute.
The first version of the EAM WS Hub was developed back in 2009 and has used and improved since then. A more detailed overview is provided in this presentation.
How?
The EAM Web Services Hub is a stand-alone Java application server, which is available as a Docker image for easy deployment. It provides a simplified REST/SOAP facade to Infor EAM and can be used from any other software environment or application that has the possibility to call Web Services. This use case is indicated as Option 1 in the image below.
The main component of the Web Services Hub is the EAM WS Core, which alternatively also can be included as a Java library directly in any Java/JVM application. This is shown as Option 2 in the image below and would normally be the preferred option if you develop a Java application that should interact with HxGN EAM.
More technical documentation and instructions are available in the GitHub repositories indicated below.
Architecture overview
The EAM WS Hub is available as a Docker image for easy deployment and the source code is available on GitHub.
The EAM WS Hub Core is part of EAM WS Hub but can also be used separately as a Java library from Java applications. The source code is available as a separate project in GitHub and a compiled build on Maven Central.
The EAM WS Proxy Client is part of the WS Hub Core and takes care of the communication with HxGN EAM. This module would normally not be used separately but might need to be extended/changed to support future versions of HxGN EAM. It is therefore also available separately in GitHub. The code is automatically generated from the HxGN EAM SOAP WSDLs published by Infor as a open source on GitHub.
Please note that in order to use this tool, you would first need an HxGN EAM installation and the appropriate number of HxGN EAM connector licenses. For more information about this, please contact Hexagon or your Hexagon reseller.
Where?
The EAM Web Services Hub components are published on GitHub under GPL v3 license.