Web Services have been around for a while, so there's nothing really du jour about them.
In both .net and Java, there are free tools (WCF and JAX-WS) that make working with web services pretty easy. The developer essentially constructs the object model, marks the classes/methods they want to expose, and the system does the rest.
That being said, SOAP is a very heavyweight message format for small messages. In most cases, you're better off using a simpler format like JSON or a custom XML schema than SOAP. However, there are a few cases where SOAP has addressed things that would be hard to re-do in custom formats.
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From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] on behalf of Nathan Andelin [nandelin@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, January 27, 2012 6:09 PM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: [WEB400] Web Services War Stories
Friday late afternoon is probably not the best time to start a discussion like this. But some of my thoughts are extensions of the XMLSERVICE discussion that has been going strong on the RPG list this week. This discussion is for Web Service producers and consumers.
One problem I'd like to address is the cost and complexity of "recommended" Web Services architectures based on WSDL and SOAP. If you go to study the WSDL & SOAP interface specifications there's a good chance that you'll be asked to first get a good understanding on XML, XML Name Spaces, XML Schema Definitions, & XML Paths as prerequisites. Then WSDL. Then SOAP. Then how they all come together in Web Services architecture.
I guess it's not a requirement to study the underlying interfaces and specifications. You could just license the appropriate middleware, frameworks, toolkits, and runtime environments from Microsoft and IBM. I haven't done that.
Web services appear to be the vehicle du jour for getting otherwise disparate systems to inter-operate. I'm facing a problem right now concerning that, which I'd like to share if this discussion catches on. But first I'd like to ask if you have general thoughts or opinions or stories or travails about integrating disparate systems through Web Services? What do you think of WSDL and SOAP and associated frameworks?
-Nathan
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