We have a WCF web service built to WSDL and XSD specifications which assumes ‘Windows Centric’ thinking. Is it possible to implement the same functionality in other languages eg PHP or Java?
I’ve found lots of instances of ‘How to build a client to connect to WCF service in [Your Favourite Language Here]‘ help, but none that come from the Service side. I assume that if you’re building the service you either use DotNet, or don’t use WCF, but I’m interested in the middle ground.
I realise that in Java one ‘could’ go right down to a low level and hand roll the whole thing, and therefore the answer is a resounding YES, so I guess my question is actually, “How should you…” rather than “Is it possible to…”.
Thanks
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you either use DotNet, or don’t use WCF
This is true. WCF is a core element of the .NET Framework. If you want to use WCF, you’re basically saying you’re using .NET.
That being said, you could implement a service that exposes itself via the same protocols in any language that supports networking, if you wanted to work at that level of abstraction…
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You can write a web service in any language you want, but you need to decide first what approach to take. The two main approaches to web services that I’m familiar with are RPC-based services (such as JSONRPC, XMLRPC and SOAP) and REST-ful web services. Once you’ve made that decision, you can probably find some type of framework in the language of your choice. I know Django (Python) can do REST-ful web services, and for Java there’s Spring Web Services just to give 2 examples.
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If you have a WSDL and an XSD, then you can use JAXWS to implement a java based webservice pretty quickly (well quickly in that it handles all the plumbing for you, you still need to implement the business logic). the metro website has great tutorials (metro is the default JAXWS implementation included in the jdk).
