The functionality that supports the production of interactive documents on ITP/Server is exposed through the ITP/OnLine Server API. ITP/OnLine, e.g., uses this API to access ITP/Server from the web server. The ASP.NET implementation of ITP/OnLine uses a .NET version of the ITP/OnLine Server API, whereas the J2EE implementation uses a Java implementation. There is also an ITP/OnLine Server API using COM.
The ITP/OnLine Server API is an officially supported API. This means that it can be accessed directly without the use of one of the ITP/OnLine implementations. An example of this would be a client application that accesses ITP/Server directly from the workstation. In order to do this, an implementation of the ITP/Server API (either Java, .NET or COM) is installed as part of the application. The application could translate the XForms XML retrieved through the API to an appropriate GUI representation.
This chapter describes the .NET, Java and COM implementations of the ITP/OnLine Server API.