Native support for Web services
Can I develop/use SOA for ASP applications? If yes, then how? If not what is the other approach?

    Requires Free Membership to View

    Login

    When you register, you'll begin receiving targeted emails from my team of award-winning writers. Our goal is to keep you informed on recent service-oriented architecture (SOA) and SOA-related topics such as integration, governance, Web services, Cloud and more.

    Hannah Smalltree, Editorial Director

    By submitting your registration information to SearchSOA.com you agree to receive email communications from TechTarget and TechTarget partners. We encourage you to read our Privacy Policy which contains important disclosures about how we collect and use your registration and other information. If you reside outside of the United States, by submitting this registration information you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Your use of SearchSOA.com is governed by our Terms of Use. You may contact us at webmaster@TechTarget.com.

The nice thing about web services (the foundation technology for SOA) is that they work against an extremely broad set of platforms. ASP.NET includes native support for web services. For ASP (pre .NET) Microsoft has a SOAP toolkit which can be used. In addition, there's nothing to stop you from supporting simple web services manually from within an ASP page (all you need to be able to do is read and generate XML documents). You can even do this more simply if you step back from SOAP and use REST techniques – with SOAP the request must be an XML message whereas with REST the request can just be URL parameters on an HTTP get. In either case, you would return an XML document though.

Of course, while you can get a web service up and running pretty quickly using any of these techniques, you will also need to consider issues such as security. The good thing is that you don't need to necessarily hand code security into your ASP application. Instead you can use a web services management product to add the security as a layer around your application.

This was first published in January 2006

Back to top