Advice on Web Service or related technology

Question

I am developing a system that must be able to receive an XML messages (preferably without SOAP envelope) from other's company external system through the internet. I am not sure what technology is external system written in. The developers from the external company must create a XML sending feature. I would like to minimazie their effort. Is WCF good choice for that?

The OS will be either Windows XP with IIS 5.1 or Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0. .NET Framework is 3.5.

Thanks.

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 02 '11 at 08:28

0

You can use the WCF but also you can use Web Services.

answered Jun 02 '11 at 08:28

Sergey K

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 02 '11 at 08:46

WCF is a very high level of abstraction in terms of implementing services over HTTP (and even other protocols like TCP). There are two options in your case

WCF REST service : As you are expecting custom XML to be passed around in HTML payload. this can be a option but only in case you can visualize the service as resource oriented.
Custom HTTP handlers : These are very low level in the whole abstraction stack of various components of ASP.NET. Which allows much more flexibility in implementing custom XML passing over HTTP but would require much more code as compared to WCF

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:04

You can use jQuery using AJAX

$.ajax( {
  type:'Get',
  url:'http://mysite.com/mywebservice',
  success:function(data) {
    alert(data);
  }
})

related examples:

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 02 '11 at 08:52

It really depends by your business. If they need call a service on you can create either a WCF or a WebSerivice (which conceptually are exactly the same things) but probably they need to change something on their side to call your service. In the case you go for this road I can suggest you to use a SOAP envelop to authenticate the sender putting kind of token in the header. Another solution (in the case the XML is very big let’s say we are talking about an XML that contain a least of all the new products) you could use an FTP and pick up the XML file from there.

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jun 02 '11 at 08:55

Picking out a technology requires more details. Some of the basics are: What's your budget ? what resources do you have now? Who will be responsible for maintainence, RFC later? Will your 'product' be called for data communication or Will your product need to call them for data communication?

To process/generate XML, the free and simple ones are, for example, JAVA, PHP (and many others too).

Advice on Web Service or related technology

5 Answers5