The IBM® Rational® Publishing Engine Web Services application provides
a remote engine that can be used to generate documents instead of
a local Rational Publishing Engine engine.
The Launcher and Document Studio connect to the remote engine and
transfer the publishing process to that system. The Rational Publishing Engine Web Services application is
optional and you can install it based on your organizational requirements.
The Rational Publishing Engine Web Services application provides
a server-side facility to relocate publishing operations, which can
sometimes be resource intensive and time consuming, to a high-performance
system. By generating documents on another server, the workload on
the client is offset.
License requirements for the Web Services application
Rational Publishing Engine licenses
can either be floating user-based licenses or authorized user-based
licenses. The Rational Publishing Engine Web Services application can
consume floating licenses, but not authorized licenses. If only authorized
user-based licenses are purchased, the Web Services application cannot
use them, and document generation fails.
Web Services application capabilities
The Web Services application provides
the following capabilities:
- Request queueing allows the alleviation of the resource strain
on the server. Based on settings, the server can process a certain
number of publishing requests simultaneously. Further requests are
moved to a queue until a slot is made free by a process that ended.
- Required artifacts are uploaded to the remote server. The Launcher
prepares an archive containing the required artifacts such as one
document specification, one or more templates, and one or more style
sheets. These files are unpacked on the server and used as required.
Data itself cannot be uploaded. The data used for configuring the
document specification must be available in the server context.
- All of the output files can be packaged into a single archive.
Unlike the local engine, the remote publishing process can return
a single output archive, avoiding the need to download multiple files.
- You can download document generation results.
- Users have mobility through connection recovery. For a long remote
publishing process, you can disconnect your computer from the Rational Publishing Engine Web Services application processes
and reconnect later without losing connectivity to that process and
download the results. On restoring the connection, you can still retrieve
the generated documents.
- With the Web Services application,
various clients can be constructed, for example, a Java™ client, as implemented in Rational Publishing Engine Launcher.