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Ftp versus webservices

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    #11
    Originally posted by original PM View Post
    Cheers Freamon

    At present I have no need for real time delivery - an overnight transfer of customer details is the main aim

    Therefore to address your points
    1) no guaranteed delivery - true but it is easier to if you have 1 sftp file per day to track whether it has been sent or arrived.
    2) built in retry-on-failure capability - see 1 can be manually re-sent if needed
    3) automated clean up of the directory where the files land - this can be a script - we do it now.
    4) capability for asynchronous delivery where the sender or recipient is temporarily down or busy - again with 1 ftp per day if either sending or recieveing system is not available at the point it can be manually re-sent
    5) automatic adjustment for network capacity and compensation for network unreliability - true

    You can solve those problems with a Message Oriented Middleware product like MQ - MQ is part of the IBM Websphere offering - which sounds expensive!!

    Cheers!

    Fair enough etc. Obviously MQ is overkill if you only have a requirement to transfer one file per night from A to B, but for an enterprise with lots of similar requirements and no capacity to babysit / manually resend files every day, it has a lot of benefits.

    If you're worried about the cost of IBM MQ, there's a few decent free alternatives, like Apache ActiveMQ ™ -- Index
    "A life, Jimmy, you know what that is? It’s the s*** that happens while you’re waiting for moments that never come." -- Lester Freamon

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      #12
      Originally posted by original PM View Post
      Hi All,

      Does anyone have any experience of web services as a method of transfering data between systems?

      At present we use ftp mainly for this which works well as it is only done once per day.

      What are the benefits of using webservices with an ultimate view of going down a full soa route?...
      I work with SAP and use web services quite often. The main benefit is the ease of interfacing, without having to worry about what the "other" system is. It also facilitates re-use - anything that can consume a webservice can easily be made to connect - without changing the service at all.

      Creating a web service in SAP is handled by wizards and a little config. I then send the WSDL files to the person developing the consumer of the service.

      Consuming a web service involves more wizards and config. After that, it's a matter of a few calls to the method of a proxy to the webservice.

      The main disadvantage is speed. Web services are some 10x slower than other means of getting data in and out of SAP. It's also not that good, as others have mentioned, for large data volumes - though having said that, we do have one interface that generates the SOAP, then gzips it before sending.
      Down with racism. Long live miscegenation!

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        #13
        Originally posted by Freamon View Post
        If you're worried about the cost of IBM MQ, there's a few decent free alternatives, like Apache ActiveMQ ™ -- Index
        I was wondering about that. Getting the budget for IBM MQ yourself is one thing, but if you have external customers they might get stroppy about being forced into it.
        Behold the warranty -- the bold print giveth and the fine print taketh away.

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          #14
          Originally posted by petergriffin View Post
          Best way to sincronize/transfer files is rsync:
          rsync - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
          ^^^^ WPGS.

          Actually transferring files is easy; it's the fail/retry bit that is hard. A good system will get back on track on its own without any extra effort, once the disk space/cron tab/file permission/network problem has been solved.
          Cats are evil.

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