Web Services

some questions

Still wondering how to get your web server to talk to your client over the internet, eh ? :) My answers follow: 1. Being the richest of platforms, the Microsoft platform is not constrained to just .net or vb for consuming web services. You have the choice of going for Java which is very capable in the webservices realm. Then, there is SOAPLite with Perl. Python also has similar features. Then you can have a browser based client which can consume a webservice, which you can very well see with ASP.NET webservices, as the browser on the server machine can act as a client. Now, how are all these possible brings me to answer question number 2. 2. Webservices are just a means of having a client consume a service being exposed on the webserver. While standardizing it, the standards body went in for an XML based protocol, somewhat akin to XML RPC. To present a simple outlook of SOAP, the comm. on the internet happens using HTTP. How would one create a standard means of invoking anything across the web? The answer, encapsulate the HTTP calls in an XML Structure and name that structure 'SOAP' and write some proxies and stubs on either side of the comm. channel. Thats all there is to it. Now, in .NET when we say ASP.NET webservices, a simple way to consume it is to use SOAP, and this step is made simple by using Visual Studio. But, having an ASP.NET webservice in no way undermines your ability to invoke this webservice from a Linux box with a Perl/SOAPLite -- because its "Standard." Then there is XML-RPC which you can use. And, then there are the rest.. err. I mean "REST". For more info on these you could try these websites. http://www.nwfusion.com/news/tech/2001/1217tech.html http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/05/12/SoapAgain http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2002/02/06/rest.html http://effbot.org/zone/rest-vs-rpc.htm http://www.intertwingly.net/stories/2002/07/20/restSoap.html http://www.xml.org/xml/resources_focus_soap.shtml http://www.xmlrpc.com/ http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=when+to+use+SOAP+and+XML+RPC 3. To measure execution speed of your component, there are a couple of approaches a. Write to log files with the date/time stamp and then using a simple vbscript open the log file and parse the times, and draw graphs or whatever. To make it more persistent, log it to a database. Could consider MSDE here. b. You can expose the relevant data as performance counters and this can be read using the tool "perfmon.exe" (under WinNT/2K/XP). Again, .NET makes it a breeze to provide/consume Performance counters in your code. 4. Already answered in the other replies 5. Just a reminder, in case you are looking for a status/progress kind of animation, you might want to check out the AVI files in the "graphics" folder in your VB installation. The samples folder also contains a sample project which makes use of these videos. In case these explanations just increase your questions, fire away, Regards, Mitesh Mehta