APIs

As described before, there are two main API's for interacting with an OME database: the Perl API and XML-RPC.

The Perl API's are generally used directly by CGI scripts residing on a web server. These CGI's would presumably be built to support applications that let users interact with OME via a web browser. For example, the OME distribution provides a menu-based system, built on the Joust menu tool. This application can be found at http://localhost/perl2/serve.pl?Page=OME::Web::Login on a server running OME.

The other API uses XML-RPC to support remote procedure calls that execute code against the database.

These two API's are actually quite similar. Essentially, the XML-RPC API is simply a wrapper around the base Perl code. This section will introduce some of the important sessions, and then describe particular details for each of the API's. The discussion will focus on XML-RPC, as that is presumably the mechanism that will be more widely used to build client applications.