Web Services are essentially software components hosted on Internet servers and accessed over standard protocols such as HTTP and SOAP that provide a service to software clients. The Web Services component of MillenniumObjects provides data services, the building blocks of applications. These Web Services encapsulate complex business logic—for tasks such as authentication, authorization, patient list queries, and patient, encounter, and personnel searches—without exposing the complexity of Cerner Millennium’s enterprise-wide repository, the Open Clinical Foundation (OCF)®. Web Services enables Cerner Millennium functionality to be executed from any platform that can produce and parse XML and communicate using HTTP/HTTPS.
Web Services are built on Java servlets, with transactions defined by XML Schema. The servlets use the Java Toolkit and Cerner Millennium middleware to communicate with OCF. The transactions’ business rules, inputs, and outputs are documented in detail in the MillenniumObjects Web Services Documentation application—an HTML-based tool distributed with the Toolkit.

The MillenniumObjects Toolkit also provides a public Java API. Use of the Java API allows applications developed in Java to directly consume the MillenniumObjects JAR file, eliminating the need to marshal and unmarshal XML data in applications. All of the domain-specific packages follow a set of design patterns that provide a public Directory class as the main API entry point to each package. Other mainstays of the MillenniumObjects Toolkit pattern are the Qualifier classes and the Object classes themselves, which make the API easy to consume.

Until now, all applications that can leverage the investment that Cerner® and its clients have made in Cerner Millennium have come from Cerner Corporation. With the MillenniumObjects Toolkit, healthcare organizations, consultants, and other third parties can create applications that run alongside those produced by Cerner. This enables new combinations of Cerner Millennium functionality to be crafted together to create new applications or extend the capabilities of existing Cerner products.

The MillenniumObjects Toolkit can be used in the following ways:

• To develop front-end applications using Cerner Millennium functionality and
the Cerner Millennium repository (OCF).
• To create visuals and workflows to fit users’ needs.
• To create applications in niche markets.
• To implement solutions on a variety of devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), the Web, and cell phones.
• To develop distributed applications that can cross platforms.