Haggis McMutton wrote:
I should mention that I'm very likely to want to write the client in a
different language in the future so I need a way of doing it that can
easily be done in other languages. I can't be Java specific.
Thinking about this a bit more then, I guess my next question would be
"Which transports/libraries do those languages support?" Pick something
that seems standard for those languages and is also well supported in
Java. I remember looking a Javascript, and thinking the best transport
would be XML. XML is used by J2EE, supported with some libraries for
Javascript, and also can be parsed by plain old Java. Whereas something
like JSON was really only good if you were talking Javascript only. It
seemed to require too much ad hoc parsing on the Java side, even though
it integrated with Javascript well.
SOAP I haven't looked into at all. As Roedy implies though it might be
good to have clear understanding of the other (non-Java) application
(which you haven't talked about, so ...). If the other side really
likes SOAP, that might indeed be the best choice. But you're saying
"HTTP seems like a waste" which to me implies you are not writing a "web
app" and therefore SOAP might not actually be used in your environment
much.
SOAP is not limited to HTTP. It is an XML format. Document exchange follows
a format defined by a WSDL. The mode of document transport is not restricted.
set of XML tags that define document transport. One is, of course, free to