Integration of chargeable web services into engineering applications

We discuss an engineering case-study in which we address the issues of integration and secure consumption of a specialist software package for finite element meshing through a web service based interface. This work focuses on demonstrating the end-to-end requirements of a framework allowing the transparent integration of the web service into the design workflow of an engineering user. After detailing an example engineering problem, we discuss server-side issues and required modules such as local accounting, security and resource management which provide a sample framework for a chargeable web service. We then demonstrate how the client can easily interface to and consume the web service from within the engineering scripting language Matlab.