Best way to define a webservice for others to implement and my software consume [closed]

Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers. 开发者_运维百科

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.

Closed 4 years ago.

Improve this question

We have a software that reads data from other third party websites, so far so good, but for each new website that we want to import data, we have to read data from their webservices so we have to implement that in our software.

But this is time consuming and we got to a point where we have several websites which want their data imported, so the solution is for us to define a standard and say "hey, you want us to import your data? That's fine, just implement "this" and type your URL into our software.

But as I do not have much experience with webservices so I don't know from where to start.

Our software is a desktop application, and most of the third party websites use webservices so that's the first idea but what would be the best way to implement it?

Just implement a Webservice and provide them then WSDL and say: "hey, make your webservice like this" doesn't seem to be enough.

Any advice?

---

If you are committed to consuming the services via HTTP, then SOAP is probably the best way to go. There are other ways you could go (a simple HTTP GET for example, provided you don't have to supply much input data to them), but I think SOAP is by far the most common.

If you're not actually limited to HTTP, then some other TCP interface could be much more efficient, especially if binary data like images are being transferred, as SOAP base64-encodes binary data which adds 30% overhead onto the packet sizes.

---

Here's something you might want to take a look at (oData) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/hh237663

---

As annoying as it may be, WSDLs seem to be the standard way of doing this, as this provides request and response data for both. Theoretically, WSDLs should be WS-I compliant as well (which is really annoying). 'Fraid I can't give much more than that though.
-mja

---

One option would be to ask them what they need in order to be able to write a webservice that you can consume. It may be the case that their technical abilities are not sufficient to implement a WSDL-based service, but they might have no problem putting together a REST-based service.