General advice on VFP9 and accessing web services

[mdav2]

Hi,

I think it best to give my level of my knowledge in relation to web services and foxpro. I have virtually no knowledge of how web services work, other than they are like functions available over the web. I have many years of foxpro programming behind me.

I am currently trying to specify changes to a Foxpro front end with a SQL server back end that needs to access some external web services.

One of the first things I am considering is where to run the web services. I looking at this from failue and retrying point of view.

For example, Use the foxpro code to call the service and it fails to run (web service unavailable, etc - is there a difference, what would get returned if the service were unavailble for example). I am assuming it would return a failure code. I would need to retry this but wouldn't want to tie up the foxpro system to do the retries. I then wondered could a SQL server could have a scheduled process to run through a table data of information and re-parse it if it fails. I would imagine I would need a separate web service of my own to do this.

Anyone know a good place where I could get a good intorduction to web services, preferably in relation to foxpro to help me put together a sensible spec.

Many thanks,



Mark Davies
Warwickshire County Council

 

[Dan Freeman]

Try

http://www.west-wind.com

for general information, particularly the whitepapers section. Rick literally wrote the book. (at

http://www.hentzenwerke.com)

You may have to rethink some stuff.

What happens when a web page is missing? The web *server* coughs up a 404 page, right? What happens when that server is missing? Your browser eventually times out, right?

Web services behave the same way, depending on how they've been written.