[Vrs-development] Re: [DotGNU]pnetlib and the VRS, SEE and other server concepts

[Norbert Bollow]

Chris Smith <address@hidden> wrote:

> I've picked up on a few Socket layer related threads recently,
> which leads me to ask exactly how a C# webservice deployed
> over pnetlib is accessed? (in a network sense).
> 
> Without going into the whole VRS thing because this applies to
> all network server concepts..... I've been visualising some
> sort of server that receives a webService request (say SOAP),
> decodes the request, discovers the webService that needs to be
> invoked, brings up the VM with the webservice in tow and
> passes it the request data.

*Nod* that's the idea of

http://subscribe.dotgnu.org/mailman/htdig/arch/2002-January/000286.html

> Now of course this webservice may call another webservice, which is 
> definitely where I see the pnetlib support coming in.

yes

> So I've always imagined the service request capture and decode
> being external to the actual web service itself.  Is this
> correct?

In many cases, yes.  However there are other situations when you
want a single webservice process to handle multiple requests.
For example, imagine an application that consists of a user
interface which runs on the user's PC plus a server-side
process, and the user interface uses SOAP to interact with the
server-side process.

> Actually that's not quite right is it? because what we'd
> really be looking for is a 'call webService' class/method
> which we could surp - hitting the low level socket layer isn't
> a help so I take back what I just said! :o)
> There isn't such a class is there??? :o(
> 
> However, surp'ing the io layer for files etc IS important for
> the VRS to route file access into the 'virtual file system'
> instead of the real OS filesystem.
> 
> 
> I don't think pnet and deployment servers are going to meet on
> friendly terms when we start to draw everything together........

Do you mean that some more libs are necessary to mediate between
the two?

> I'd like to see a system where the delivery and content
> encapsulation of requests is transparent and handled by a
> netserver component, and webservices just get the data payload
> (XML of course! :o)
> Delivery of requests can then be SOAP etc over HTTP/SMTP/FTP whatever.
> 
> Any thoughts?

Yes, this was discussed on IRC some time back.  I think the idea
was to write a library in C for this, which would be linked into
C and which at the same time would be made available (via C#
wrappers) to those webservices which want to be able to do this
kind of thing themselves.

Greetings, Norbert.

-- 
A founder of the http://DotGNU.org project and Steering Committee member
Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet   (near Zurich, Switzerland)
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