Some general questions on webservices
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I don't know if this is the place to ask general questions about web services, but this forum seemed the most appropriate. I havn't had much experience with web technologies so what I hope for is a "push in the right direction"... What I would like to do is expose a fairly complex framework as a set of webservices. The individual services may take a long time (up to an hour) to complete, so asyncronous calls will probably be used. The output of one service is often input to another, so I'd eventually like to use some kind of server process control. The server will be on a UNIX station and I'll probably implement it in Java. I've looked at some different technologies this week, and this is what I've come up with:
- The transport will probably be SMTP. I've looked at protocols like BEEP and JMS, but it seems easier(?) to use ordinary mail.
- The service invocations will probably use SOAP generated by JAX-RPC (is there a standard SMTP binding for SOAP?). Possibly a special mail service (based on Apache James?) handles the requests and orchestrates them (handles the process control and invokes local or remote HTTP services).
- The responses will be sent as "notifications" over SMTP (something like a REQUEST<=>N*RESPONSE pattern)
- For process control the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) seems promising. I've not read through the spec, though.
Did this make any sense? Are there better ways? Any comments, suggestions, experiences or links would really be appreciated at this stage so I don't lock myself in with a dead end technology... Thanks /moliate
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