Simon Fell > Its just code
Keith says : "For instance, I would always use UDDI, even within a LAN, for automatic roll-over. How? Well, that's what I'm describing in my book today :-)" Of the people I've talked to who have used UDDI, this is the by far the most common reason for using it, but i just don't get it. Deploying reliable web services is the same as deploying reliable web sites [after all, its just HTTP], why would would you need start using UDDI, what's wrong with the usual DNS, Local Director / WLBS, Global Director style approaches ?
Ingo correctly points out that Web Services based on .NET Remoting [rather than ASP.NET WebServices] can be used without IIS. The oft cited wisdom is to use remoting for .NET to .NET work, and ASP.NET WebServices for Interop with other platforms. The remoting stuff can at times do things that aren't really supported in other tools [like remote references, and its tendency to type things via unpublished schemas], but you can use it in an interopable way. The sereration of format and transport [aka channel] in Remoting also gives you the flexiblity to add transports, say if you wanted to support a SMTP binding.
The White Mesa Soap toolkit comes with its own HTTP server, if you want to do Windows based Web Services with out IIS.
Speaking of overhead in DotNet web services... you have to run IIS. [Patrick Logan's Radio Weblog] Yes, the Java guys do seem to have more choice in this, but the only [non-Java] web servers I've seen people run on Windows are IIS & Apache. However it doesn't have to be this way, the ASP.NET web services are actually built on top of something called the HTTP pipeline, and there is an ISAPI filter/extension that puts requests into the HTTP pipeline from IIS. Although this is the only thing that ships out of the box, you can write code to host the HTTP pipeline yourself. I've been tinkering with hosting in a simple command line tool, so that i can use the ASP.NET engine for code generation [ala Gen<X>], and someone sooner or later is going to write the bits to host it from Apache. Brad's .NET Web Server project would also be a good candidate.
Last update: 2/9/2003; 5:27:40 PM.
