Best practice on exposing webservices

Question

I am new to a development team that is adding a layer of webservices between domain and gui. The approach has a lot of potential but I wonder how to manage the webmethods. At the moment there is just a handful or so webmethods but there will be a lot of them when we get through to the other side.

I am sure there must be some very clever thoughts on this out there but I can't seem to find any. Do you have any tips?

(Since the website is still in .net 1.1 they are using asmx - not sure it is relevant)

update: What I am looking for is ideas on how to organize the interface : naming standards? one service per domain object or some other clever way?

how do you do it in a clever, easy to read and understand way?

Answer 1

A few questions,

Is this a internet app or an intranet app. Depending on it you can choose to fix the level of security to host a web service.

Also you need to logically separate the webservices which will help in locating and consuming the webservice instead of searching for it.

If you are able to migrate the .Net platform to 3.5, the development and consumption of webservice would be more beneficial in terms of features and development time.

Answer 2

I'm not sure what you mean about managing the web methods? You should only expose a web service operation (what ASMX calls a web method) in response to an actual requirement. Your question then boils down to how do you design your service in order to meet requirements.

You should be aware that Microsoft now considers ASMX web services to be legacy technology, and they will be fixing few bugs, if any. It therefore makes no sense for you to be developing new web services using .NET 1.1. A .NET 1.1 client can use a WCF service developed with .NET 3.5, so that's not a limitation.

Answer 3

I checked the suggested link and ordered the book recommended there - which hopefully will give me some ideas on how to order my internal and external webservices.

thank you all for helping //östen