Channel 9 Forums - Coffeehouse - XML Web Services 2

Coffeehouse - XML Web Services 2

dugsnake — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 13:39:04 GMT

Two questions:

1) Does anyone know if there is any organization/committee that is working on defining XML Web Services interfaces for organizations? For example, what web services should a bank provide, what web services should a manufacturer provide, etc.

2) Is there a link or tutorial on how to pass binary data to a web service? For example, how do I pass a png file to a web service?

Thanks in advanced.

Coffeehouse - XML Web Services 2

dugsnake — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 14:37:14 GMT

I think I found the answer to my second question. I think the idea is to use serialization to send the data via SOAP. Am I on the right track?

Coffeehouse - XML Web Services 2

David Oliver — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 15:53:56 GMT

The answer to question one is yes, Oasis UDDI can be found at www.uddi.org @ UDDI you will find a directory of organisations web services as well as standards for common areas.

To reassure you, yep serialising (yep I'm British) is the way to pass binary data via soap.

I remember you saying in a previous post that was anyone else using Web Services? My experience has been that web services are great when used the right places and used properly but without a plan and some organisation it can all get rather complex and messy.

If I was you I would look into something called 'Service Orientated Architecture' which is often shorted to just 'SOA'. http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/soa/default.aspx

I don't want to do a tutorial on SOA just to say in brief that it isn't a 'Silver Bullet' architecture but a set of best practices and half of them aren't new. Yes it is far reaching and comprehensive and evidentially unfinished but it's a goal and all good plans need one of them.

Have anymore question ... post away!

-Sabot

Coffeehouse - XML Web Services 2

Sven Groot — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 17:54:11 GMT

dugsnake wrote:

2) Is there a link or tutorial on how to pass binary data to a web service? For example, how do I pass a png file to a web service?

You will need to serialize, because it needs to be valid XML. Typically you'll use something like base64 encoding to pass arbitrary binary data around. There is something called WS-Attachments, which allows you to attach binary files to SOAP messages using DIME. WSE has a pretty simple to use WS-Attachments implementation. I have however found it's not really performant once you start passing around really large files, but for your average PNG it'll probably do.