Web Service solutions from Mac

Question

Trying to find a way to rapidly develop web services on the Mac Server platform that will be served via Apache and need to be able to write to flat files or SQL Lite on the Mac.

We have .net, ObjC, C++, Python, and Java skills. We have done lots of web service work before on Windows and will probably go with Azure when we build out the product.

Our development server is on Mac OSX 10.5.8 and we are on a tight time and cost budget to get a prototype done for a small beta group (< than 500 transactions per day) that we can later rework.

We are thinking SOAP, possibly REST. Not sure what is available for Mac?

Any help appreciated // :)

Answer 1

What about Ruby on Rails? Easy to deploy, runs great on the Mac - and is trivial to setup RESTful web services for.

If you dont need all the magic of Rails, the other (albeit) Ruby option would be to use Sinatra - I would challenge anyone to find a RESTful webservices library easier to use than that - its so elegant and so easy. I am primarilly a .Net developer, but I picked up Ruby and Sinatra in a heartbeat.

In either case, I would stay away from SOAP - In my opinion it's just too inflexible these days. In a web 2.0 world of live internet APIs making the webservices RESTful is the easier, faster (and smaller) option. We used to use SOAP exclusively where I work, but the reality is that it just doesnt deliever in the same way that REST does. With the accessibility of JSON and XML serialization frameworks out for any languge even the object passing is trivial. SOAP is harder to scale, is harder to test, uses more bandwidth and is not as flexible. Not everything can talk SOAP (out of the box), but tell me something that cant do a HTTP request?

Answer 2

If you are developing a service, you must have some idea what clients you are trying to serve. If those clients expect to talk to a SOAP service, you'll need SOAP. If you are just serving JavaScript code-in-a-browser, REST is probably sufficient.

Apache CXF, being 100% Open Source Java, can be used to build REST or SOAP services on MacOS or anywhere else. There are, of course, other options.