I am building an iOS app that should communicate with a WCF Rest Service. They both will be on the same local network. While testing a have hardcoded the IP of the service, but that wont work when it will be deployed.
How can i get the service address, or connect to it in any way?
I was reading about WCF discovery but I don't know how I would implement this in iOS.
If it is of any help, im using WCF REST Service Template 40(CS)
Any help would be appreciated.
EDIT: How about using bonjour? Any thoughts?
WCF Discovery is an implementation of the WS-Discovery specification, which is an open standard. As such there are a few implementations of it, for example one in Java called java-ws-discovery, one in Python called python-ws-discovery and one in c sharp called WS Discovery proxy.
I haven't found an implementation in Objective-C but given those three are all open source you may be able to port one, or at least the part you need (depending on whether you are able to understand one of those languages).
Related
At the moment i still only have about 2 months of experience in UI5. i developed a little sample-app, used sap gateway builder to pass my requests to sap backend.
Now my employer asked me to research the possibility to access two different backends (one sap, one nonsap) via odata from the same app. After a little reading and thinking i came to the conclusion that it would be best to access both backends from a single gateway.
Since ive already worked with sap gateway, i wonder if there is a way to access nonsap backends with sap gateway? Are the better options?
Or is my current approach complete wrong and i should think about a whole other way?
It depends on your approach and the non-sap-system:
Is the non-sap-system accesible via Webservices? Then use second data model (e.g. JSON/ODATA) within SAPUI5 by loading data via webservices after initial loadup of your application.
Is the non-sap-system connected to SAP? E.g. via RFC or another technology, then you can read data from the other system during calling your initial Gateway service and simply call your RFC function module in your method.
From my opinion you will not achieve an 'easy' way to read both via one single SAP NetWeaver Gateway.
Not sure why you would want to access a non-SAP oData service via SAP Gateway. On the other hand you may want a router of some sort so that all services are exposed on the same network location and then incoming requests are routed to the appropriate backend for action.
You may also want to "mash-up" the SAP and non-SAP services into some sort of new service. In that case maybe look to some of the API management tools like Apigee to help you achieve that.
I am building a WCF service now, that has a wsHttpBinding endpoint.
The client for now is WPF.
I would like to know if in the future, it would be possible to develop an iOS application that would be able to connect to my WCF service endpoint (it has to be wsHttpBinding, because I need security, reliability and ordered messaging).
Thanks.
I researched a bit and from what I found, it is not possible (at least not easily), please inform me if there is a way
For security I followed the following solution, which fulfills my needs:
Building .NET WCF service for iPhone with authentication
Usually not, but it depends how you configure the WSHttpBinding. If you use any kind of message level security almost surely you will not be able to call it from iOS. I'm saying almost b/c iOS supports sendins soap over http and some of the scenarios (useranme) are not complex so in theory you could manually push them to the soap. But for the most part basicHttpBinding is better (and also prefer transport security).
We currently have an .NET 4 application that consists of Windows Service running in the background and local or remote clients (only 1-3 normally).
The clients have a WPF GUI and need some data from the windows service. Therefore, we use WCF with NamedPipe binding for a local client and NetTcp binding for remote clients. This works, but we often have problems with endpoints that are not reachable (channel faulted or not found etc.). We already try to rebuild faulted connections but it seems to be pretty fragile...
Now enter Web Api: It looks like a HTTP based stack might be more robust (no channels, no endpoints, can be self-hosted in windows service as well). There seems to be no problems with broken channels because each request is handled individually. So if something fails, you just repeat the request. (And we have experience with ASP.NET MVC from other apps, so this not new to us).
Now we are thinking what might be our best bet. Is it better to "harden" our existing WCF service (one service interface with about 15 operations) or to move the interface to Web Api and run it as HTTP requests (with JSON data)? Performance is not our main issue here...
Any ideas?
Hartmut
I recommend you stick with WCF (SOAP) services for your WPF application rather than moving to the Web API. There are a number of reasons for this. First I think we need to consider what the new Web API is trying to address - namely to provide a framework for supporting RESTful/HTTP/hypermedia services. This is likely to be a good fit for building applications that make heavy use of HTTP such as web, mobile and JavaScript applications, where you want to maximise the "reach" or interopability of your services (irrespective of platform). This is not to say that you can't use it for WPF clients but in your case, where all traffic is local to your domain, it makes more sense to stick with your current implementation.
The binding choices you have made for your services / clients sound ok to me. I would focus on why your channels are faulting and address these issues. You may also want to consider hosting your services via IIS and use WAS to expose your non-HTTP endpoints. I have had much success with this in the past and for the most part has been pretty stable. It also takes away a few of the headaches with managing your own host. If you are concerned about the TCP binding faults, then just create a new HTTP or wsHTTP endpoint and use that instead. This will provide you exactly the same transport the web api uses without having to change your programming model.
I have some delphi code which, given a list of items, calculates the total price taking into account any special deals that might apply.
This code is non-trivial to rewrite in another language.
How should I set it up to communicate with a website running on the same server? The website will need to ask it for a price every time the user updates their shopping cart. It's possible that there will be multiple concurrent requests.
The delphi code needs to maintain an in-memory list of special deals, periodically refreshed from a database. So it cannot simply be executed every time or anything as simple as that.
I don't know what the website is written in, or even which http server it runs under, so I'm just looking for ideas or standard methods.
It sounds like the win32 app is already running as a Windows Service on the box. So, if you can't modify that service, you are going to have to deal with whatever way it wants to accept and respond to requests. This could be through sockets or some higher level communication protocol like web services.
You could do a couple of things. Write an assembly that knows how to communicate with the service and have your web site use that assembly. Or you could build a shim service that knows how to communicate with the legacy service, but exposes communication over higher level protocols such as web services. Either way will have the benefit of hiding the concurrency, threading and communications issue behind an easy to call interface, but the latter will make communicating with the service easier for everyone going forward.
If you can modify the delphi app to take an XML request and respond with an XML answer over a TCP socket (ideally using the HTTP protocol), you will be able to make it interoperate with most web server frameworks relatively easily. But the exact details of how to make that integration happen will depend on the language/framework it was written in.
If the web server is on windows you can compile your delphi app as a DLL that can return XML or HTML, taking parameters as part of the URL or a POST operation. Some details on making a Delphi DLL for web servers are here.
It doesn't matter what web server or OS the existing system is running under. What matters is what you want YOUR code to run under. If it is windows then the easiest solution would be to use WebBroker and write a custom ISAPI application, or use SOAP to expose web services. The first method could be used if you wanted to write a rest like API for instance, the second if your web application has the ability to consume web services.
Another option, if you are running both on the same box under IIS, is to create a COM/Automation object which you then invoke via server side scripting (ASP). If the application is an ASP.NET application, then I would use PRISM to port your code into an assembly.
I have done this with a quite complicated workers compensation calculator. I created a windows service using RemObjects Sdk. The calculations are exposed as a soap method so it can be accessed by nearly anything.
It's not necessary to use RemObjects in the service but it makes it much easier to do as it handles a lot of the underlying plumbing. The clients don't need RemObjects, they just need to be able to call soap methods. Nearly any programming langugae can do that.
You could also create an isapi dll for IIS that exposes a soap interface. This would be useful if other websites on different servers needed access to the methods. However I have handled this in my case by opening a port in the firewall to access my windows service.
There is a lot of examples on the web. A couple of places to start reading are About.Com and Dr Bob.
Torn this app into Windows Service. Write Web Service that will communicate with your windows service. You should spend some time designing your Web Service, because this Web Service is going to be your consistent interface, shielding old Delphi app. So in the future whenever you will want to write web app, mobile app, or whatever you will imagine, you will have one consistent interface – XML Web Service.
A popular way to integrate a web application with background services is a message broker.
The message flow would be:
the web application sends a "calculation request" message to a message destination on the message broker, which contains all needed parameters and also a correlation id to match the calculation request with the response from the Delphi service
one (or, in a high availability / load balanced environment more) Delphi services handle the messages: pull the next incoming message, process it by feeding the parameters to the calculation engine, and send a "calculation result message" back to the web server
the web server can either synchronously wait for the response (and discard responses which have no matching correlation ide) and build the result HTML document, or continue with other tasks and asynchronously receive the calculation result in a separate thread, for example in a Ajax based web application
See for an introduction this slideshow about the Dopplr image service:
http://de.slideshare.net/carsonified/dopplr-its-made-of-messages-matt-biddulph-presentation
If you can make it a service (but not a library), you have to do inter-process communication somehow - there are a few ways to do this on Windows:
Sockets directly which is hardest since you have to do marshalling/auth yourself
Shared Memory (yuck!)
RPC which works great but isn't trivial
DCOM which is easier but a pain to configure
WCF - but can you call it from your Windows Service written in Delphi?
I am using .Net 2.0 framework and would like to call a function in Windows service from a web service. Is this possible? And If yes, how much control I will have over the function i.e passing parameters, getting the result back etc. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated :)
Remoting is your best option if you need to pass parameter values.
If you don't need to share objects or anything too complex, ServiceController is probably easier.
You can do it through .NET remoting. If you go that route, it will appear you are calling a method and getting a result, but all your parameters will be serialized over the wire, and the result will be serialized back. Therefore, everything must be made serializable.
How about hosting a WCF service inside of the Windows Service. You can use net.tcp or named pipes to communicate between "your" web service and the one in the Windows Service. You can use the NetDataContractSerializer for serialization with type fidelity.
You could implement a basic http server that maps certain requests to functions. Query-string will be mapped to parameters. Actually not hard and I have done this in the past (as I provided some rudimentary template-based reporting). It wasn't dynamically, but it could be done dynamically. Look at HttpListener for a starting point. You could as well host the asp.net engine in it.
It has it advantages and disadvantages.
Why not package the function in its own DLL then distribute it with the Windows Service and the Web Service separately?
Create service project what export an interface COM or use PIPE to transfer data.
View this Interprocess Communication using Named Pipes in C#