Up and Running with LabVIEW Web Services
July 7, 2014 – Jon McBee – Bloomy Controls, Inc.
LabVIEW Web Services were introduced in LabVIEW 8.6 and provide a standard way to interact with an
application over the web. National Instruments significantly changed the development experience of
LabVIEW Web Services in LabVIEW 2013. This whitepaper will act as an introduction to LabVIEW Web
Services in LabVIEW 2013. We will step through the process of creating a LabVIEW Web Service that will
publish data to a thin client rendered in a web browser.
Terminology
As we progress through the example we will come across terminology commonly used in the world of
web development. I will do my best to define these terms here; I encourage you to explore
www.w3schools.com
for more information.
• HTML: HyperText Markup Language is the language used to create web pages. To see an
example of HTML right click on any webpage within any web browser and select “View page
source”.
• URL: Uniform Resource Locators are web addresses
• CSS: Cascading Style Sheets is a language used for defining the look and formatting of an HTML
web page.
• JavaScript: JavaScript is a computer programming language. JavaScript can be called from or
embedded in HTML documents in order to change the content of an HTML element.
• JSON: JavaScript Object Notation is an open standard format that uses human readable text to
describe data objects.
• jQuery: jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting
of HTML
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• AJAX: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML allows us to exchange data with a web server using
XML or JSON, without reloading the entire page.
• Thin Client: User interface provided by an application through a web browser.
• Web Service: The software running on the server that responds to the requests of the client.
• SQLite: SQLite is a software library that implements a self-contained, server less, zero-
configuration, transactional SQL database engine
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.
Tools
You will need a text editor in order to interact with the HTML, JSON, CSS and JavaScript code detailed
below. I recommend using Sublime Text, which can be downloaded for free here:
http://www.sublimetext.com/
. You will also need LabVIEW 2013 Full, Professional, or Developer Suite.
It is important that you use LabVIEW 2013 or newer, as LabVIEW Web Services were refactored for
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"jQuery: The write less, do more, JavaScript library". The jQuery Project. Retrieved 29 April 2010.
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http://www.sqlite.org/
Copyright © 2014 Bloomy Controls, Inc. www.bloomy.com