I'm attempting to setup a very simple read only integration with Windchill. There's an abundance of documentation on the Info*Engine, but much of it seems to start in the middle, with almost nothing on actually getting started.
I'm also a little stumped on what approach is actually considered the current best practice. In our situation, we will have the Windchill instance on one server and the other application on a completely differnt server. We've done this specific integration with other apps several times now and we we've typically used fairly straightforward SOAP or REST web services to pull information from the other application.
So what is the best way to do this with Windchill?Our connector architecture is all Java based so in an ideal world we could write something to access the Windchill directly, but if we need to use a web service, that's fine too.
If I understand correctly, remotely accessing Windchill involves invoking one of a number of stored "tasks". These tasks are actually jsp pages, but with an extension of ".xml". There are a number of PTC created default tasks. There seem to quite a few ways to invoke the tasks and retrieve the results from their invocation, but this is where I start to lose the trail, and I'm not even 100% sure I'm correct with what I described. I looked for some training on this topic at PTC University, but didn't see anything that matched our needs.
I read about something called the "Service Access Kit (SAK)". What I'm not able to determine is if this "kit" is something that can be downloaded or if it's something that is included as part of the Info*Engine implementation in Windchill. I've tried to run some of the SAK code samples I've found, but as I described above, the samples start in the middle; they are just the code itself with no information on how to setup a development environment where one could actually run that code. In an effort to get the code running, I've copied nearly every jar file I can find (hundreds of them) in my Windchill installation to my development computer and added them to my classpath and I STILL get ClassNotFoundException's when I try to run the code snippet.
So I'm a bit lost. Any tips?
