Re: Exchanging information

Mark Space wrote:
Haggis McMutton wrote:

I should mention that I'm very likely to want to write the client in a
different language in the future so I need a way of doing it that can
easily be done in other languages. I can't be Java specific.

Thinking about this a bit more then, I guess my next question would be "Which transports/libraries do those languages support?" Pick something that seems standard for those languages and is also well supported in Java. I remember looking a Javascript, and thinking the best transport would be XML. XML is used by J2EE, supported with some libraries for Javascript, and also can be parsed by plain old Java. Whereas something like JSON was really only good if you were talking Javascript only. It seemed to require too much ad hoc parsing on the Java side, even though it integrated with Javascript well.

SOAP I haven't looked into at all. As Roedy implies though it might be good to have clear understanding of the other (non-Java) application (which you haven't talked about, so ...). If the other side really likes SOAP, that might indeed be the best choice. But you're saying "HTTP seems like a waste" which to me implies you are not writing a "web app" and therefore SOAP might not actually be used in your environment much.

SOAP is not limited to HTTP. It is an XML format. Document exchange follows a format defined by a WSDL. The mode of document transport is not restricted.

If you like XML generally, SOAP provides the advantage of a well-thought-out set of XML tags that define document transport. One is, of course, free to reinvent that solution.

--
Lew
.

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