Architecture-switch to Web Services; newbie needs advice

From: Ney André de Mello Zunino (zunino_at_inf.ufsc.br)
Date: 03/04/05 

Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 13:10:06 -0300

Hello.

Firstly, a bit of background information: I am involved in the
development of a relatively small distributed application which, in
short, deals with the remote editing and maintenance of some conceptual
graphs (the very domain being irrelevant). For many reasons, including
personal preference and motivation, I had set two main constraints for
the choice of technologies to be employed: they ought to be both *free*
and *portable*. This led me to the gathering of the following tool set:

   * C++ as the programming language for all tiers
   * Ice [1] as the communication framework
   * MySQL [2] as the database backend
   * MySQL++ [3] as the API to the database backend
   * Gtkmm [4] as the UI toolkit for the clients

After some struggle, I managed to get the basic architecture in place so
that I was able to have my clients and middle-tier talk and exchange
information. From that point on, I thought I was done. Unfortunately, I
have faced countless difficulties, many of which aggravated by the lack
of proper documentation and other resources, inherent of open source
initiatives. I don't mean to sound ungrateful. I fully understand the
fact that those people are out there putting in some serious efforts and
mostly getting nothing in return (financially, at least). The thing is
that sometimes that model does not go well with real-life business
models and deadlines.

So, here I am, under a drive to go for an alternative solution. I spent
some time looking around yesterday and doing some thinking and here is a
basic summary of the new architecture I envisaged:

   * Build the middle-tier as a Web Service
   * Build the client application with C# and Windows Forms on Visual
Studio .NET 2003

I am aware that I am giving up some virtues with these new choices. The
goal is to be able to rely on better-supported tools in order to
complete the development timely. On the other hand, I have several
questions I would like to have clarified:

1) At the moment, there is a real constraint with regards to the
platform from where the Web Service will run; it has to be on a Linux
system (there are only Linux servers available).

   1.a) What does one need in order to turn a regular HTTP server into a
Web Services-capable provider? In other words, what makes a server a Web
Services provider? As far as my understanding goes (I am a complete Web
Services newbie, having never implemented anything related), a server
need only be able to parse SOAP messages to process the encoded request
and to encode responses as SOAP messages to respond to clients. So,
supposing I have a regular Linux server running Apache HTTPd, what do I
need to install in order to be able to host Web Services?

   1.b) In spite of the initial constraint that the Web Service must be
hosted on a Linux server, I would like to know whether it is common and
whether it would be easy to have the same service hosted on a different
platform, e.g. a Windows server. Because one of the most advertised
virtues of Web Services is their interoperability capabilities, I would
assume that porting them should not be very hard as well. However, we
know for a fact that practice doesn't always reflect theory.

2) How would the C# client be affected if the Web Service were moved
from the initial Linux server to a different platform? I expect that the
client would be (mostly) insulated from that kind of change.

3) How difficult is it and how long would it take (roughly) for a Web
Services newbie to grasp the basic concepts necessary to realize a basic
architecture like this?

4) Could you indicate some must-read elementary material and also some
hands-on tutorial on how to build a C# application which consumes Web
Services that were not created with .NET (if that matters at all)?

I apologize if I couldn't be clearer in exposing my concerns. I would be
very glad if this thread could serve to clear up my almost inexistent
understanding of Web Services and the ever-growing list of hype
terminology which frightens me. All in all, I prefer to believe the
thing must not be as scary as it seems. I just need to find a proper
introduction.

[1] http://zeroc.com/
[2] http://dev.mysql.com/
[3] http://tangentsoft.net/mysql++/
[4] http://gtkmm.org/

Thank you, 

-- 
Ney André de Mello Zunino

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