Adaptive Server Anywhere integrates an HTTP server and a SOAP manager into the database server. It allows you to send a SOAP request over HTTP to Adaptive server anywhere, and then adaptive server anywhere returns the answer to the client requesting HTTP.
You can expose a stored procedure or query in a database to a Web service. As a simple example, the following statement creates a Web service that provides a list of system tables:
CREATE SERVICE mytables
TYPE ’XML’
AUTHORIZATION OFF
USER DBA
AS SELECT * FROM SYSTABLE
The result is a string containing an XML document in which each row in the result set is an element, and the value is displayed through the attributes in the element. After this very simple statement we have transparently addressed security, permissions, and format issues.
In addition to simple XML types like the one above, adaptive Server Anywhere offers several other types of services: The SOAP service returns the result set as a soap reply, and the dish service, which determines the SOAP processor, generates a wsdl;htm for each service in the group L returns an HTML document; RAW allows you to fully customize the output.