Martin, forget webservices. Nowadays they are all about "pull" or
"submit", and you want to "push" data.
Did you consider a messaging system?
First, you probably want to chunk it to make each "delivery unit" more
manageable. Next, you want them to be delivered as chunks, so a broken
connection will not compromise the whole transfer. Finally you want it
fast so you need to open several sockets at once.
If you need to exchange a lot of data it does not makes sense to force
it through a single TCP connection. Most servers have a limited ability
to reach high speed in a single connection due to TCP handshaking
limitations.
A quick and dirty recipe to transfer a zillion records of structured
data as a stream:
a) Again, forget webservices and RPC.
This is a raw data transfer problem.
b) Chunk your data and pack it in well formed XML documents, making them
suitable to be handled in lots of platforms.
c) Send them through a messaging system. The simpler, the better. Is
SMTP good enough? Go for it. If you want a sophisticated, "dog wags the
tail" solution, there are also plenty of message-queue servers around.
d) Need to ensure chunk sequence? Here you will cover your hands with
some dirt to write a transport handshake mechanism, like windows in TCP.
*Saran
Martin Jericho wrote:
>
> QUESTION 4: All I really want to do is send a large
> array of structured data in a platform independent way.
> I would like to use the standard RPC encoding of SOAP to
> avoid having to define my own XML schemas for the data,
> but I'm not sure whether today's SOAP implementations
> are mature enough to use for this purpose. What do
> other people do in this situation? I can't imagine I'm
> the only one.
>
>
> Thanks
> Martin Jericho
>
>
>
>
