Asynchronous Web Service

Hello,

Can webMethods 6.1 support asynchronous web service? If it support, can some show me some samples about how to do it for both the IS as Service and IS as Client? Thanks in advance.

1 Like

What do you mean by “support asynchronous web service[s]”? What do you want to happen when an IS-provided web service is consumed or when IS consumes an web service provided by some other application?

In short, nothing comes out of the box to “support asynchronous web services” but you can quite easily implement an asynchronous style of web service is IS 6.1 depending of course on what you actually want to accomplish.

Mark

Hi Mark, Thanks for reply.
We need to do some communications with our applications using Web Service. And we hope to do the communication in a asynchronous way, that is when IS is a Web Service Client, the sending activity will finish after send the SOAP message completly, and no need to wait until the Service Provider process the SOAP message completly. And the Service Provider will feedback the process result asynchronously.

We can do this on .Net platform easily with the VS2003 or VS2005, but I can not find the information on webMethods 6.1. Thanks a lot.

I think your are talking about a callback pattern instead of true asynch processing. .Net is using a callback which is not really asynch in my opinion as there is a waiting background thread for the return reply and if that thread were to be killed or die off your reply would be lost. It’s nice in that it lets you do your screen navigation and other stuff without waiting on the response but ultimately it does come back to a waiting thread tied to your running process even if it is in the background.

As Mark C said webMethods IS doesn’t do that out of the box like .Net but you could make it behave that way. I’m thinking a replyto URL and spawning a background thread would work in a similar fashion as what .Net is doing.

Of course if you have a long running process and need to have real asynch messages coming in and out of the process then webMethods BPM is for you.:proud: