Ever since the concept of web services first gained popularity, developers attempting to use these web services have faced two challenges: The first challenge is finding the right service to use; the second challenge is writing the code to call these services. The goal of this article is to describe how IVAAP uses HATEOAS hypermedia links to address both problems.

To show geoscience datasets on one of IVAAP’s 2D map widgets, you need to use a common visualization coordinate reference system. This is where Apache SIS helps us: It understands the properties of both the data and visualization systems and is able to convert coordinates between them.

There are a few low-level changes that won’t make it to the release notes, but make a difference for users. For example, we optimized the data caching mechanism. Instead of being based on the number of datasets, the data caches are now based on the size of these datasets. This typically means lower latency as more datasets tend to be cached within the same memory space. This is a feature we initially used only with WITSML wells, and that we have extended to other connectors and data types.

The IVAAP data model was created after researching the commonalities between the industry data models. However, when we built it, we kept in mind that each data store carries its own set of information, information that is useful for users to consume. This is why we made “properties” a part of the data model itself. From an IVAAP SDK point of view. “Properties” is a set of name-value pairs that you can associate with specific entities within the IVAAP Data Model.

One of the productivity features of the IVAAP Data Backend SDK is that the services developed with this SDK are container agnostic. Practically, it means that a REST service developed on your PC using your favorite IDE and deployed locally to Apache Tomcat will run without changes on IVAAP’s Play cluster. While the Data Backend SDK is traditionally used to serve data, it is also a good candidate when it comes to developing non-data related services. For example, as part of IVAAP 2.8, we worked on a “gridding” service. In a nutshell, this service computes a grid surface based upon the positions of a top across the well of a project. When we tested this service, we didn’t deploy it to IVAAP’s cluster, it was deployed as a standalone application, as a servlet, on a virtual machine (VM).