October 2015 - xAssets Remote API

xAssets has created a new Remote API which is intended to ease development for customers and developers needing to integrate, federate or otherwise link to xAssets in a hosted environment.

Although the xAssets API was already available for this kind of development, it required specific knowledge of SOAP and the API specifications, this client API wraps up the SOAP and WSDL calls so that developers simply call into a local .NET 4 DLL to issue web services commands. The interface is very simple with only four published methods to get and save data.

In addition, the remote API exposes a new programming language - xAssets Remote Scripting Language XRSL, which enables most integration requirements that would normally require an API program call to be developed without any Visual Basic or C# programming whatsoever. The language support scenarios such as API commands to get data, reading and writing from files, conditional processing and variables, HTTPGET from any web resource, and API commands to save data and run xAssets Transformations with parameters.

The API also supports Sql-to-Sql integration across the internet. Without exposing ports the technology can pull standard API requests and write the returned data into a local Sql Server database at the client end, allowing integration tools to access this data via simple cross-database Sql Statements. This means that no programming is required to pull data from file structures into each tool being integrated with where the tool only accepts Sql integration.

This new technology is a substantial complement to our existing rapid application development framework and will facilitate much quicker development of integrations without having to have the xAssets database on the same network as the systems being integrated with.