Advice Needed on Using WebServices

[Jothi]

Hi,
We are a small application development group. We have about 100 Users who
primarily use Microsoft Related Products.
Our Application Development was purley based on a CLient Server Model using
Visual Basic and SQL Server.
We plan to move forward to the .NET environment.

We plan to develop applications with ASP.NEt as well as VB.NET.

Right now we have some COM components or DLL's that we use. For example we
have a DLL called the DSNP Server which is consumed by all our applications.
The function of this is to return DataBase Connection Information for each
application.

We are planning to replace this by a WebService.
1) My first question here is : Do you think the web Service is something
ideal forthis type of functionality.

2) We also need our applications to discover this web Service dynamically so
that if the server hosting this web service goes down we dont need have to
recomiple all our applications to discover this web service. We had planned
to Use Microsoft UDDI Services to accomplish this.
DO you think UDDI Services is an ideal solution for this or is it a over
kill ? What is a good solution.

We eventually plan to use WebServices for other things to where we want to
share information across different systems for example share human resource
information to an application for time cards etc..

I would appreciate if someone could throw some light on this. This would be
of immense help.

Thanks,
Jothi

[Mongo]

Jothi,

I'd be very careful on proceeding with this route. In the event of a simple
service providing one-time information to an application is fine. If you are
frequently asking for data from the webservice during a users run, I would
rethink the strategy. The primary reason I say this is that webservices
introduce IP calls and latency that do not exist with tightly bound code.
This latency builds significantly if you are thinking of using webservices as
you "data layer".

Assuming the DBConnection information is sensitive, do you really want to
expose this over a webservice for security purposes? If so, you'll probably
want to float the actual connection string back as an encrypted, then encoded
base64 string. Each app will need a key or reference a common library to
decrypt.

If looking for redudancy, I'd look at putting 1 or more boxes behind a
simple load balancer that all users can point at.

"Jothi" wrote:

Hi,
We are a small application development group. We have about 100 Users who
primarily use Microsoft Related Products.
Our Application Development was purley based on a CLient Server Model using
Visual Basic and SQL Server.
We plan to move forward to the .NET environment.

We plan to develop applications with ASP.NEt as well as VB.NET.

Right now we have some COM components or DLL's that we use. For example we
have a DLL called the DSNP Server which is consumed by all our applications.
The function of this is to return DataBase Connection Information for each
application.

We are planning to replace this by a WebService.
1) My first question here is : Do you think the web Service is something
ideal forthis type of functionality.

2) We also need our applications to discover this web Service dynamically so
that if the server hosting this web service goes down we dont need have to
recomiple all our applications to discover this web service. We had planned
to Use Microsoft UDDI Services to accomplish this.
DO you think UDDI Services is an ideal solution for this or is it a over
kill ? What is a good solution.

We eventually plan to use WebServices for other things to where we want to
share information across different systems for example share human resource
information to an application for time cards etc..

I would appreciate if someone could throw some light on this. This would be
of immense help.

Thanks,
Jothi