RE: Socket Application Design

Mark,

It sounds like you need send some sort of acknowledgement message after
the auth request. This would make the communications look like this:

Auth Request => Server
Auth Response <= Server
Ack Request => Server
Ack Response <= Server

If the remote system sends a unique id with the Auth and Ack (you'd want
the same unique id used for Auth) requests, you should be able to tie
everything together that way.

Also, when you start logging credit card stuff, please be mindful of the
PCI (Payment Card Industry) requirements which require sensitive data to
be encrypted with 3DES or 256-bit AES when in transit and being stored.

Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
mgarton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2007 4:43 PM
To: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Socket Application Design

Hello,

I have been given the task of redesigning our credit card authorization 
application.  Today a store connects to the listener running on a 
corporate server.  A new job is spawned for each connection.   This job 
send the authorization message to a job, CC Send, via data queue that 
sends the auth message to the processor.  The CC Send job keeps a 
persistent socket connection to the processor and all it does is just
get 
a message off the data queue, send to processor, get response, and send 
data back to the spawned job via another data queue.  There multiple CC 
Send jobs running so that messages don't get backed up on the data
queue.  
Hopefully that makes sense.

I need to have visibly between processes some how.  The CC send job does

not know if the store ever receives the auth response.  So what I am 
wondering is if it makes sense to combine the processes of receive the 
connections from the stores and sending to the processor?  Or if the 
processes are kept separate, how is the best way to get the data between

the processes? 

Thanks.
 
Mark Garton
O'Reilly Auto Parts