Web Services Made Simple
Today’s IDEs make folding in a web service fairly straightforward, but the overhead for this development ease can be considerable. There is a simpler way to accomplish the same result.
Web services provide a tremendous amount of flexibility in designing, building and deploying distributed information systems, not to mention some interesting possibilities of changing things on the fly. All of this capability comes with a lot of moving parts, with a number of them being separate and disparate. It would be nice if some of these could be repurposed, if not eliminated entirely.
Using programmatic POSTs obviates the need for the SOAP/REST handlers and the accompanying impedimenta. The big advantage is that the back end processing is just another active web page that ‘thinks’ a browser initiated a request. An even better advantage is the reduction in wire time, which can be considerable, making for some marked improvement in response times. Using a programmatic POST instead of a GET also increases information security.
The programmatic POST data is contained in form fields, easily supplied by a set of name/value pairs that are part of the POST’s invocation argument, with the response in a single string. Authentication can be done in a number of ways, all of them straightforward and easy to do. It also helps if the POST is done within an SSL context, and that the form data be encrypted as well.
Parsing the return can also be very simple, far more so than, say, JSON. The easiest way is to return XML that is amenable to a number of parsing components.
Not as sexy as real web service interfaces, be they SOAP or REST, but much simpler to manage.
We’d like to think that our drive for efficiency was the cause of this implementation discovery, but there are a lot of clever people in the world, and this technique is probably taught in Junior High schools today.
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Tags: managing software, modular software development, simple programming, web services