[nanpu]

Hi,
I need to create an asynchronous web service, preferably using XFire framework. How can I use Blue to do this? When I create a new XFire web service, can I just turn some feature on and get a asynchronous web service? Thanks a lot for your help. My group is ramping up Blue quickly and we are exploring new features of Blue.
Wesley

[Riyad Kalla]

Wesley,
Could you clarify what you mean by “asynchronous web service”?

More specifically, you can implement your client code to asynchronously call *a* web service, and not block execution of the application… but that is client-implementation specific. I don’t understand the use of “asynchronous” with regards to the web service itself… all a web service can do is receive HTTP requests and respond to them in a typical HTTP request/response cycle… there are no other ways for that web service to behave as that is a limitation of the HTTP protocol itself.

I googled the term and came up with a lot of tutorials that *use* that term, but in reality are only explaining how to code an asynchronous client to make requests to a deployed web service, which made me thing the term itself is just a misused term, but you asked specifically about turning a feature “on” and making your service itself async, so that’s what I’m confused about. Please clarify what use-case or functionality you are after and I’ll do my best to provide a suggestion.

[nanpu]

Riyad:
Thanks for the response. There have been a lot of talk about asynchronous web service. What I mean by it is that when a client of the web service calls, the web service just send an acknowledge that says ” I got the request”. Then the client can unblock it and do whatever it wants to do. The web service can then go on to completed the service requested by the client.( Typcially, this kind of service may take a while to finish, eg. run a big query) When the web service is done, it then call the client back and send the real response back to the client. To accomplish this , the client need to implent a web sercie itself. And when the client need to include its own endpoint in its request (eg. in the soap request message Header element) so that the web sercie can call back. This will require the support of the application server. But I am wondering whether Blue will make this easy. For example, when you create a new web service, just check some options, the web service becomes asynchronous. If Blue doesn’t have it, this could be a feature nice to have.
Thank you for your help.
Wesley
P.S. I have another question about the failure of created new web service from a pojo in another topic. Could you please take a look and answer it?

[Riyad Kalla]

Wesley,
First let me appologize, right after I posted that (not having known what async ws was) our Blue product manager hit me up and explained it. We don’t currently support that mode of development with web services in Blue specifically, so we don’t have any wizards to generate those artifacts for you supporting that at this time.

Also I’ll go take a look at that other post and see if I can help. Thanks for the clear explanation of async ws… I really had no idea these things existed, but after you explained how they work it’s very obvious why you’d need that for long running processes.

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