Confusion with web services.
Hello.
I have been growing generally more confused over the whole web services thing today. I would really appreciate some advice here.
I want to expose select functionality of internal systems to the outside world via web services interfaces to them. I thought fair enough, what I need to do is have all these web services on one server, and messages are sent between the web service and the internal system it acts as a proxy for. I created my web service stub and began thinking about how I should implement the earlier said communication to give the web service the functionality it requires.
Now that I've started down this road, I don't think having the web service on a different machine to the system I want web servicified is quite what is needed. If anyone has any suggestions for me, please let me know what they are.
Thanks,
Owen.
# 2
Hi there.
That may be so, but what do you recon is the better way to go. To have all one's web services on a central machine that then makes RPC calls to internal applications on different internal servers, or possibly to have web services on each machine that is occupied by one of more of these internal systems.
If we go with the second option (against my former intentions), how should I wrap the web service? Should I use a web service at all because I do not know of a 'web services server' that has an unobtrusive footprint in this situation. You wouldn't want to install a web server on each of the machines that host internal systems because this would just be inefficient and downright ugly.
So, what am I to do?
# 3
When I say RPC calls, keep in mind that these internal systems are probably not implemented in Java, and even if they were, their source code isn't available to me.
So, I think I should discount the use of the term RPC. I need a way to implement a process on the host of an internal system that has a small footprint. This adaptor program, written in Java and therefore continually running on a JVM, waits for an incomming message (over JMS), performs the operation on the (local to this JVM process) internal system that the request is made to, and shunts the results off to another JMS queue.
Sounds good to me, how about you?
Owen.
# 4
I could not follow completely about your architecture or requirement, But on what I read and understand, You need an Integration architecture. I'd rather suggest you to go for seebeyond, which is an open source EAI tool by SUN.
# 5
Thanks for your reply Vivekanand.
You're right, I do need some type of EAI tool.
I am looking at OpenESB at the moment. What are your thoughts on it? Does this give me what I need? What are your impressions of the products functionality, stability and maturity?
I am an employee for a small company who is starting down a SOA path, and it would be good to get a handle on which open source product would be best for us.
# 6
Hmmm... SeeBeyond.
I'm confused. I thought OpenESB was a Sun offering. I don't know if this is true any more, because why would Sun offer two separate ESB solutions?
SeeBeyond certainly has a flashier advertising pitch - obviously aimed at your average results oriented business executive what with man on cliff face staring out over vast horizons etc... but it doesn't seem as open as OpenESB... I'm certainly experiencing a dilema now.
SeeBeyond certainly looks slicker, and that has given me the impression that it is more mature, functional and stable than OpenESB. However, I know that what it has given me is only an impression, and with this in mind, I'm leadning to OpenESB because I feel reasonably assured that I won't need to pay for trivial support because the user community might be larger with OpenESB.
Hmmm.... any suggestions/advice?
