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HowTo Desktop apps & web service

 
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Hello,

I want to build a very simple reporting tool with no user gui. It's supposed to check if some production servers are running. Reporting mechanism will be Java Mail Api. I want it to be in first place a standalone application.

But nevertheless I want a simple web servic interface to be able to let other applications connect it. The question is:

Do I need a servlet container like tomcat? Or is there another option to have it propagte a web service? I want to keep it very slim.

cheers,
Pete
[ June 11, 2006: Message edited by: Pete Neu ]
 
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You don't need Tomcat, but using it will make things simpler, because you you do need a server that listens to HTTP and makes sense of WS requests. Using Tomcat would enable you to use (e.g.) Axis as the WS engine. But you could certainly do without it, especially if the WS does not make use of SOAP, WSDL etc., but instead uses a lighterweight approach like REST.
 
Pete Neu
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I read about the axis standalone mode.

http://wiki.apache.org/ws/SimpleAxisServer

Has anyone ever tried it? Could this be the solution to make a small web service avaliable? Or is there no way around using tomcat or jetty?

@Ulf: If I get the idea of REST right it means that I mimic the functionality of the complicated soap stuff to simple http communication. That means I will have to generate xml myself and provide the neccessary urls?
 
Ulf Dittmer
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SimpleAxisServer sounds interestimg, I had never noticed it before. Being an application, it should be easily embeddable in a standalone app. Certainly worth a try.

Using REST, a client access URL could be as simple as http://www.your-server.com/reporting-webservice/parameter1/parameter2/...

You're right that the resulting XML would need to be generated by your code. But from the description of what the service does that doesn't sound too hard.
[ June 12, 2006: Message edited by: Ulf Dittmer ]
 
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