o4glws is an opensource project to implement a wizard and a framework to make it easy to publish PROGRESS procedures as WebServices generating the WSDL and WS code, without requiring the developer to learn XML or the framework itself.

With this tool the developer can select an existing PROGRESS procedure and produce the WSDL file and/or a proxy procedure that handle the SOAP call and translate between SOAP and PROGRESS datatypes. It also can handle the WS-I security recommendation requiring a custom procedure to authenticate the user/password.

Also, the generated proxy procedure is based on procedure templates (skeletons), these templates allow the developer to choose how to deploy the webservice. The developer can choose between webspeed, a batch version to call it from a CGI, a socket based version, or a custom template, etc.

This kind of project had been there for years, i had read some documents about howto build it, but nobody had been released the complete solution as open source by now. It's an alternative to the commercial version distributed by PROGRESS, only that this version doesn't require Sonic MQ or the AppServer to run properly.

By now the wizard is implemented in the PROGRESS Graphical interface and can only run in Win32 but i have plans to release a java version, and also to include some options to generate javascript stubs to call the webservices from any page. The java version will relay on webservices made by the PROGRESS version, this will be posible using version 0.3 because it's fully compatible with Apache Axis.