Hello. I have a server that is running Ubuntu Linux Server Edition. I once had a Windows Server and it is easy to create web services using ASP.net on Windows. Linux on the other hand does support ASP.net using Mono, but is isn't as full featured as Windows. So what would be the best way to create xml web services on a linux server box?
Thanks
There's a plethora of materials available with a simple search for "PHP Web Service" on Google. I'm not really sure what language you're using or what type of service you want to set up so I went with PHP Soap.
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2007/07/26/php-web-services.html
Linux web development is actually a world of difference from Windows web development. In leau of the bureaucracy of "applications" and "web services" we have scripts you can invoke via Apache, and if you want to get more advanced, daemons that can handle TCP/IP connections.
If you want to use something specific like SOAP, you should mention it in there, but as far as I know, Linux web development isn't service-based like Windows is.
There's a lot of industry standard specification and implementation in Java dealing with all aspects of server side web programming. Start off by an open source implementation such as Apache Tomcat and/or any of http://ws.apache.org/
If you want to use ASP.net then use a windows server.
If you have to use Linux for some reason then you need to learn another language to work properly in the linux environment.
I guess the best answer depends a bit on what you really need, but one option is to use any of the recent web frameworks, such as Rails, CakePHP, or Django, which allow you to easily define database backed models, and then compose dynamic sites. Turnaround on these frameworks can be measured in minutes for simple sites.
There are many ways to do this, but given your ASP.NET background why not give the MonoDevelop IDE a go, it has matured a lot and will continue to do so.
Although it is based on a commercial product the following is an excellent primer to assist you in understanding how you would develop a Java based web service on Linux. If you find a similar tutorial based on free software please share it.
I came across the same problem recently. I wanted a thin layer to turn my SQL database into a webservice with JSON or XML support. All I wanted to do was to have to write the SQL statements... it seemed a pretty reasonable thing to ask.
However, all the options I found involved installing some sort of enterprisy "do everything" solution. So I ended up writing some "glue" which took SQL statements defined in XML "dataset" definitions, and served a simple, RESTful web service.
I documented my approach here:
http://www.nsquared.co.nz/jarvis-docs/jarvis_guide.odt
If you want to use the framework, I can give you a tarball of the latest release. It's used in three or four small applications currently, 2 ExtJS, 1 Flex, and 1 Asp.Net.
"So what would be the best way to create xml web services on a linux server box?"
A web framework like Turbogears, Django, Grok, Repoze.BFG, WebPy or such.
Depends mostly on the web server and web language you run on Linux more than anything else. If you're using Apache Tomcat, look at Axis2 (http://ws.apache.org/axis2/) and CXF (formerly XFire at http://cxf.apache.org/) JBoss has web service support built-in (JBossWS) so it's fairly easy to use and since it's a JEE server, it uses standard web service code that is portable.
You can also write web services using PHP if you use that on your web server. Apache = IIS PHP or JEE or JSP or JSF = ASP.Net There are a lot more choices in Linux land...