Web Services the Key to Seamless Data Integration?

One of the most significant changes in the software industry in recent years has been the arrival of Web services, which are now taking aim at the event registration industry.  In a nutshell, web services are a truly distributed computing model in which applications "talk" to one another.  All of which favours very well with one of the exhibition industries latest “buzz” words: database integration.  In short, it is quickly becoming the next evolution in online registration.

Essentially Web services are a network interface to application functionality, based on standard Internet technologies (see Fig. 1).

Let's say that you have a membership database which resides on a server in your office (the Client Program in Fig. 1). This database needs to be accessed within the registration process in order to verify membership status.  Instead of sending your registration vendor your entire membership database in weekly batch files, this function can be handled in real-time without any human intervention. By verifying membership data in real-time you can avoid inconsistencies caused by using multiple databases, simply initiating a Web service call every time a change has been made within your office membership database you will eliminate errors and increase efficiencies.  Additionally, you can help to drive membership sales by allowing non-members to join immediately during the registration process so they can benefit by accessing conference member rates.  Simply said, whenever the application needs to verify a member, the program would send a request to a Web service to do it. The Web service would do the verification, respond with the results and populate the data. From a programming standpoint, Web services can be thought of as functions that you can call over the Internet.

The great thing about Web services is that they're based on standard protocols that serve to ensure that any Web service can be accessed by any client program, no matter what language they're written in and no matter what platform they're running on. So a Java based program can access and use a Web service written in VB.NET and deployed on a Windows server just as easily as a Windows program can use a Web service written in Java and running on a Linux Web server.

Given the flexibility around Web services, event organizers could produce different Web service calls in order to seamlessly integrate with many 3^rd party applications.  For instance a user can login to the event website and from there move freely around to other event related sites such as registration, housing or social networking (matchmaking) which all would appear seamless because sites could look the same and the user profile would carry over.  This would allow for higher level of customer service by opening the door to things like personalized messaging on each site or even offering special products or prices based on their profile information.  By seamlessly wrapping various applications together so they all “talk” you will provide your attendees with an intuitive application that will ultimately enhance their user experience.

Showcare has a Web service API for communicating with ShowReg along with a very easy to follow developers tool kit.  If you wish to integrate any of your data or if you have an idea of how Web services can improve your business, please don’t hesitate to contact us for more details at 1-888-892-0745 or by email at sales@showcare.com.  It is so easy.  You could have integrated membership data in just a couple of days.