Introduction
So you managed to get past the part about who you are. This either means you will understand everything in this document or that you know exactly what you are looking for. Either way, it is our sincere hope that the information found in these chapters will help you get the most out of your pcMobile.
Let us start off with the basics; what is PCWM? At the core it is a set of service pipelines served up by a Tomcat instance. The fact that it happens to be Tomcat is purely circumstantial. It could just as easily have been Resin, Jetty, Glassfish or any number of other, equally qualified, application servers out there. Tomcat happened to be easier to work with and easy to embed. These pipelines are exposed as servlets to the web client. These servlets however are not of much use to someone else as they use a very specific RPC model specific to GWT (Google Web Toolkit) which is used to develop the front end/client(s).
The same services do however have a different access point which is web services. If you have a look at the chapter on web services you will find all the information you need to write a complete client solution on top of the capabilities in PCWM. You could potentially - if you were so inclined, although it is this author's sincere hope that you aren't - make your own PC web client. Please don't. There are much more interesting applications for this technology.
Who is this document for
This document assumes you have a working knowledge of a lot of things. However, even someone without that knowledge should be able to glean bits of relevant information from the parts they are interested in. For example, you do not need to be an MDX wizard to configure the caches, nor do you need to understand the intricacies of networking to able to fathom how to use web services to render a simple chart.
However, if you expect to understand everything covered in here you should have a passable knowledge about
- HTTP1.1
- SSL
- Windows Security
- Active Directory
- WS-SOAP
- MDX
- Analysis Services
- IIS