That was very helpful Dean. Your explanation was far more clear than the
one I provided, so I'll quote you back to the decision makers..
--
Jim Oberholtzer
Agile Technology Architects
-----Original Message-----
From: WEB400 [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Dean Eshleman
Sent: Tuesday, May 03, 2016 10:21 AM
To: Web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Web services primer
Hi Jim,
First, I would ask a couple of questions. Who is going to be consuming
these web services? Are they for internal use or external use? What
programming languages are the developers familiar with? Do you want to do
SOAP or REST? So many questions to answer.
For the last seven years or so, we have been using Websphere Express on the
IBM I for our web services. We utilize the web service wizard in RDi to
generate a Java front end for our RPG programs. The Java code is deployed
in Websphere. These are SOAP based web services that are consumed by our
.NET developers. It makes it easy for them because they import the WSDL
file which generates the interface code for them. This approach does
require buying RDi Business Developer in order to get the web service wizard
functionality. This approach has worked well for us since we don't have any
Java expertise here. We have over 60 web services deployed using this
approach.
I know that some people say that REST web services are the way to go these
days due to performance and a less wordy interface. For us, we haven't
experienced any performance issues with ours. The other downside to REST
web services in my opinion, is the development effort to implement them both
from the provider and consumer side. On the provider side, you need to
parse the input and build the output string yourelf. Same way on the
consumer side. There may be code available that makes it easier than
building the entire string manually. With our approach, the generated java
handles all of that for us. I'm sure others will disagree with my opinion.
Having said all of that, if you want to call these web services from the
browser via ajax calls, I think REST is a better fit than SOAP due to
javascripts ability to call the two types of web services. It likes REST
better.
I have looked at the IWS the last few years to see if that is a better
option for us, but I haven't been convinced yet. The one thing I don't like
about it is it is hard to manage the generated objects and move them between
a test and production environment. At least I haven't found a way that
works very well. I should say this opinion is based on what I have read
about it, I haven't actually tried it.
Hopefully, this is helpful information.
Dean Eshleman
Software Development Architect
On 5/3/2016 9:12 AM, Jim Oberholtzer wrote:
Folks:
I have a customer that is about to take the plunge into web services.
They first need to choose if they use WAS 8.5 Express, IWS or TOMCAT.
Some of the IBM i instances have the Zend server so they would use
that when available. Next they need a good primer about design and
implementation.
I've found the basic web sites from IBM but I'm wondering if the group
has some suggestions on best practices and resources to use.
The customer is at V7R1 now but will be at V7R2 very soon and
potentially
V7R3 by end of year. Any comments on the IBM i environment as it
relates to web services would be welcome as well.
While I can build and deploy a simple web service, I am far from an
expert therefore my request to you.
--
Jim Oberholtzer
Agile Technology Architects
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