Looking for a good Web Services book to read?

wlafrance · April 28th, 2005, 07:12 AM

Well, my company has finally been convinced that web-services would be a great solution to getting / pushing data instead of using email and ftp... Now I would like to bolster my knowledge in the area and read about best practices and get a better understanding in how to develop and deploy a robust solution for my company...

We develop using MS Visual Studio 2003, mostly VB.NET, but I can also develop in C#... We will be using MS Servers and such also...

[u]Can anyone suggest a good read be it a book, or web link.</u>
What I am trying to learn is this:

We will have to push data to a client when our records change. So I would like to get a better understanding of how to push data. Most info I read is about consuming a web service... I also want to know the best design pattern for such a push service.

Warren C. LaFrance

planoie · April 28th, 2005, 08:29 AM

Warren,

You are looking to push data TO the customers. Using web services for this task would mean that the customer would need to host the web service that you will call/consume. If you wanted the customers to PULL data from you you could host a webservice for them to call/consume (just as functional as FTP). But then you've changed your tactic from PUSH to PULL which isn't what you want to do.

Only if the customers have a common listening service can you implement a push service. Perhaps the approach you'd need to take is to build a web service that will talk to the customer's systems. You'd need to install this web service on the customer's system. This is the only thing I can think of if you want to use a web services approach to push data.

-Peter

wlafrance · April 28th, 2005, 02:24 PM

The customer has already implemented their web-service.
When data changes in our database, a trigger is fired that copies the data into a temp table...
A program that monitors the table then fires to push the data to the other companies web-service.
I have already created a simple application that does this... But my main concern is future growth and I want to make sure as we publish our on web-services for others to consume and we consume(push/pull) other companies data I am implementing a sound solution instead of some hack... I have been looking into Microsoft's BizTalk server technology for some of this...
http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/eva...talkserver.asp

Just not sure what the best pattern of design would be...

Warren C. LaFrance