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Charles Wilt wrote:
> Lets say you need to call an external web service from multiple
> applications on multiple systems.
> Does it make sense to create your own internal web service to act as
> basically a gateway to that external web service?
Walden H. Leverich wrote:
On the down side, as Aaron pointed out, there's a single point of
failure, but that's only true if you only implement the service on one
machine. Implement it on two and they're redundant.
FWIW, another alternative to address the "single point of failure"
problem would be to create a library function (ie. a SRVPGM or DLL) on
each system that is responsible for calling the web service. I expect
you might want to do this in any case. Then, in the library, you could
call direct to the external web service if the internal one is down.
Of course, if the internal web service is down, you've lost your
caching, logging, and other benefits of the gateway, but at least you
have something. I guess the decision of whether this is acceptable
comes down to which is more important - access to the web service or the
logging, caching, etc.
If you want to have a simplified interface to the internal web service,
you would need to implement the less simple interface once per machine
on top of the implementation in the internal web service, with the
obvious maintenance concerns.
Just a thought in case the redundant web server option is not feasible.
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