ECHO encourages the development of external clients that take advantage of the services offered ECHO. In order to create an open relationship between ECHO and its client partners, the ECHO team requests that potential client partners begin by completing the Client Partner Application found below. The application will be reviewed by the ECHO team in conjunction with Project Managers to determine compatibility with the ECHO scope and goals set forth by the ECHO Technical Committee (ETC). Please read the Client Partner Operations Agreement (OA) before submitting your application to fully understand all that is required by ECHO Client Partners. By submitting the application, you agree to comply with the terms specified in the OA.
After the submitted application is reviewed and approved, the ECHO team will work with the new Client Partner to complete the Client Partner Operations Agreement. This agreement covers the Client Partner roles and responsibilities in the operational ECHO system and the corresponding roles and responsibilities of the ECHO team.
Please address any questions you have with becoming an ECHO Client Partner by emailing the ECHO team at echo@echo.nasa.gov. The Client Partner Application and Client Partner Operations Agreement can also be mailed to this address as well.
The ECHO API exposes Web Services to allow Client Partners to discover and submit orders for science data contained within the ECHO holdings. Additional services allow for the management of user profiles and groups, event notification subscriptions, service invocations, data access management, and more. For a full view of the ECHO API Web Services, view the API documentation found here: http://api.echo.nasa.gov/echo/ws/v9/index.html.
The information referenced in the Client Partners section of this website will describe in greater detail the functionality available for use by ECHO Client Partners. The Client Partner User's Guide found below has also been created as a consolidated reference for ECHO Client Partners.
New ECHO Client Partners should also review the Systems section of this website to gain a clear understanding of the different ECHO instances and their specific use. In brief, Client Partners should direct their testing to the ECHO Alpha Testbed or Partner Test systems. The Operational system should only be used for testing in coordination with the ECHO Operations group. The ECHO Team will work with Client Partners wishing to become an Operational Client Partner and perform queries against the Operational system.
ECHO utilizes the Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) to expose the web services that are offered by the ECHO API and is compliant with the WS-I Basic Profile 1.0. The WSDL document can be interpreted by programming tools and environments that generate code to expose the functionality natively (e.g., in Java, C/C++, etc.). The actual details of the transport protocol used are handled internally by the code. The ECHO System uses the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) as its transport protocol.
All communication with the ECHO API must be performed utilizing a secure connection. ECHO uses the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection protocol to communicate securely with client applications. All unsecure communication will be denied by the ECHO System.
In conjunction with the available Web Services, ECHO uses the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to represent science data queries and query results. These XML documents are validated by the Document Type Definition (DTD) and XML Schema specifications.
Developers will also want to become familiar with the ECHO Data Model.