Note: in this post, I will suggest a new framework (a new Telerik product), not really a new Control. However, Telerik support asked me to post this here anyway. I would really like to hear from you what you think about it.
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Dear Telerik Team,
as consultant for one of Europe's largest telecommunication providers, I am constantly involved in projects that require Intranet-GUI's that can easily call Web-Services.
Your RAD controls are great for building appealing Intranet-GUI's.
And your OR-Mapper makes it easy to bind the RAD controls to data sources.
But what is missing is an equally simple way to use Services as data source or data target of web guis. (See http://up-download.de/en/xtreme/manuals/5.00/webservices.pdf for an example of how that could look like)
Here's a very, very typical example of a normal project I am currently involved in:
Application: "Obtaining and enriching information from an external credit agency"
Here's how that is supposed to work:
1. A user enters data about a new customer
2. The user clicks an "identify" button
3. This action leads to the following actions:
* An internal customer identification service is being called using the data the user has previously entered
* If that service cannot identify that customer with sufficient hit quality, an external identification service is being called - using the previously entered data again.
* The result set is being displayed to the user (grid)
4. the user chooses the item that represents the customer whose data he entered
5. He clicks another button
6. This action leads to this:
* The external credit agency is called via web service
* When it returns the requested information, 3 more services are being called to enrich that information
* Another service or mapper is called to package all that information into 1 neat XML package
* That XML package is being stored in a database
7. The Web-GUI renders the content of that XML package and displays the resulting report.
This is only one of many projects that work similarly.
And it should be possible to build a basic prototype of this without a single line of code.
There should be a web service framework which does to web services what your OR mapper does to databases: make it easy to work with data and make it easy to use that with RAD controls. But I am not aware of such framework. Are you?
If not, I would like to suggest that you build it.
That framework should make it possible to visually import and edit WSDL files, visually transform data so it can be used by RAD controls, and bind their request/response data to RAD controls.
There are some companes (INTREXX, TIBCO) that seem to go into that direction - but they are not quite there yet.
I am sure that in a service-oriented world, it should be a piece of cake to make an intranet GUI able to consume Services without coding.
Thank you very much
Sincerely
Matt