Does that server belong to your organization or to an external party?
I suggest that you don't use web services for direct communications between
these applications, at least not for shopping cart integration.
Your System i is probably not available 24/7, but a web facing shop is. How
do you propose to accept customer orders when your System i is down?
This problem has a solution, you must have a buffer between the shopping
cart and the order processing. Today email serves as your buffer, and both
application are decoupled.
Web services are technologically tightly coupled and synchronous. In order
to use direct application-to-application web services, your shopping cart
must have extensive error management capabilities, must be able to store
unprocessed orders, and must have robust resending capabilities. IMHO this
is usually to much to ask of a shopping cart, especially when there are
existing and proven technologies that provide the buffering.
Solutions:
1. Keep using email, but use a dedicated mailbox and automate the email
processing. It is simple to write a POP3 processing program (even in RPG).
This method however, although simple to implement, has a serious drawback:
Orders can be faked by sending bogus messages by email.
2. Use FTP or any similar file transfer tools, but use a drop box server
instead of direct FTP to the System i. Alternatively save order locally in
the shopping cart and have the System i access them remotely via FTP, SSH,
SMB or the tech of your choice.
3. Use middleware like EAI, EDI, ESB. There are good open source solutions
that will not empty your pockets. Mule, WSO2, OpenESB to name a few. If you
chose this, you can and should use web services on the system i as the
method of communication. A middleware stack decouples your applications and
serves as a buffer.
4. Use a messaging infrastruture like Websphere MQ or JMS. This has a
similar effect to the middleware above, but the deployment and application
integration is different.
Cheers,
Shalom Carmel
Venera Systems Ltd - Cloud Computing, Architecture and Integration Experts
www.venera.com
On 5 May 2011 20:00, <web400-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
date: Wed, 4 May 2011 21:30:35 -0400
from: "Jim Franz" <franz400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: [WEB400] receive web order from another server
Need to receive orders produced from a shopping cart on another server.
Each will have name/address order & shipto info, plus 1 to many detail
records.
No CC stuff. No $$ for edi software.
I'd like to sound halfway intelligent talking to a php developer on the
other end as
to how we could handle this (web service pgm?) or simple ftp...
Many orders a day but we a not talking huge volumes. Currently getting it
via email.
This then will feed into an inhouse entry system, v6r1 & strictly a RPG
shop.
Jim Franz
midrange.com
