Simplifying Development With OpenROAD JSON-RPC

With the release of the new patches at the end of December for version 6.2, Actian OpenROAD (our rapid application development and flexible deployment solution) is providing new functionality in the form of JSON support and JSON-RPC support for OpenROAD Server.

Those familiar with OpenROAD would know that an application server was available from version 4.1. This allowed the ability to place the business logic on the server side while a thin client had to deal solely with the user interface. The thin clients could be an OpenROAD application or even web clients, but they had to have the appropriate shared libraries installed. Managing that overhead was sometimes too complicated.

The JSON-RPC interface provides the advantage of allowing for connectivity without the overhead. A simple client, such as an HTML page with Javascript, can connect to the OpenROAD Server via JSON-RPC with no additional libraries or plugins/add-ons. Of course, there are many other options, such as PHP or .Net, all without the need to register or install anything.

Any legacy client applications will work the same way. They can be upgraded from older versions with the Property Changer or deployed using OpenROAD LoadNRun. They could be also easily migrated to use a thin web client or any type of client that supports connectivity this way.

Here is how simple the code could be, using the jQuery ajax method in this example.

$.ajax({
   type: 'POST’,
   url: baseUrl,
   data: JSON.stringify({
      "jsonrpc": "2.0",
      "method": methodName,
      "id": 3,
      "params": methodParams),
   async: false,
   dataType: 'json’,
   contentType: 'application/json’,
   success: function (data) {
      // Your SUCCESS code
   },
   error: function (data) {
      // Your ERROR code
   }
});

Here we make a standard AJAX call in which we pass the JSON-RPC parameters such as method name and parameter list.

The JSON-RPC feature in OpenROAD will certainly enable developers to deploy a variety of client applications connecting to OpenROAD Server applications much easier than before.

See examples and demos for different client implementations at Actian OpenROAD JSON-RPC Examples. For more information about OpenROAD please visit our product page here, and if you have any questions feel free to ask our active community here.

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