--- Jerry Abbott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Our company is a ecommerce company. We currently have no middle tier. We > are looking into moving most all of our business logic into a middle tier. > The middle tier will need to communicate with both our internet and our > intranet (which consists of a 300 person call center and more ). We were > planning on putting the middle tier in its on farm. There is a possibility > that we will be moving the call center to an external location in the > future.
By putting this kind of service on a physically different middle tier you will introduce a network roundtrip (or more) from the web servers to the middle tier servers each time a business component is used. This is not commonly done. Most people install middle tier components on the web servers to eliminate this extra roundtrip. > The question is, can we do this with web services? Would we want to do it > with web services? If not then what? Should we plan on using both .net > remoting with web services? Web services are more for remoting when you can not control the network protocols very well. You are best off using DCOM or .Net remoting for your own machine to machine remote calls. Web services grew from the desire to link business partners, at different physical sites, together. Proprietry protocols such as DCOM and IIOP didn't work very well over the internet in practice, and also the cost of implementing private inter-network connections. SOAP over the Internet is the solution. Web services would be best used with business partners on remote sites over the public Internet, where a private inter-network link is impractical. An example being if you want to include Microsoft .Net passport as your authentification. It would be impractical for Microsoft to install a new private link for each user of passport. > I think I have gotten confused with all the web services hype. It seems > powerful and I like the interoperability but is the performance hit going > to be to much? Two general rules are worth bearing in mind (usually in this order): 1) Extra roundtrips are best avoided where possible. 2) Sending more data (size) than is necessary is best avoided where possible. 1) is about design of your interface to your business objects, and also about putting things on the same machine where possible. SOAP is relatively costly (at the moment) in terms of 2) data size. A binary protocol is going to be lighter. Peter Foreman __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - your guide to health and wellness http://health.yahoo.com You can read messages from the Advanced DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from Advanced DOTNET, or subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com.
