Re: Web Service

["albartell" <albartell@xxxxxxxxx>]

>Is it as simple as creating a RPG-CGI program that receives xml formatted
data and writes xml formatted data back to the browser or is there more to
it? 

In theory it is as simple as that, but there is a lot more under the covers
that you have to be concerned about.

>I'm not opposed to using SOAP and WDSL, but it is necessary in order for
the RPG-CGI program to be considered a web service?

The "politically correct" way to do web services is SOAP over http. I am not
a huge fan of SOAP because most serializers escape the payload (i.e. < is
transformed to &lt; and > is transformed to &gt;) which creates a lot of
unecessary overhead in translating before the payload hits a parser (for
document literal cases, but doesn't really effect RPC approach).

The more I hang around WSDL the more I like it.  When I was introduced to it
a few years back I thought it was extra baggage because I couldn't see the
purpose behind it.  But in reality it solves a lot of questions up front
like what is the url of the webservice, what is the protocol, what are the
input and output parms, what is the datatype(s) of the parms, etc.

In the end you could relate a WSDL to an RPG prototype except it has a lot
more information because of the additional technology involved (i.e. in RPG
you don't have URL's that represent another program, instead you just have a
library list and make program calls like so: CALL     PGMABC)

HTH,
Aaron Bartell

-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Grizzly Malchow
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2006 11:52 AM
To: web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [WEB400] Web Service

I'm looking into a way to use an RPG program as a web service (server side).
Is it as simple as creating a RPG-CGI program that receives xml formatted
data and writes xml formatted data back to the browser or is there more to
it? 

My understanding is that SOAP will be used to post xml formatted data to the
web service and the web service will return xml formatted data. All of the
examples I have seen use SOAP and WSDL and none of the examples I have seen
call an RPG-CGI program.  I'm not opposed to using SOAP and WDSL, but it is
necessary in order for the RPG-CGI program to be considered a web service?

Regards,

Griz

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