how to create a c# app to listen for xmls and reply in xml

Question

Hi,

I know that you can create web services in .net and have them run on iis. I'd like to make something that doesn't rely on iis as the webserver I'm using runs apache.

The eventual app should listen for incoming xml documents and repy in the form of an xml document, the client application will be running Javascript and sending xmls via http post requests. Is this something that SOAP handles?

All the guides and tutorials seem to follow the microsoft way, all hosted on servers running iis... is there a way around this?

As you can tell I'm quite confused as how to start.

Answer 1

I would strongly advise against implementing your own web service hosting platform - this really isn't a trivial thing to implement, especially if you want to be passing proper web service messages between your servers.

One option that would allow you to utilize WCF and Microsoft's baked in web service functionality is hosting WCF as a standalone service. In this model, you aren't using IIS to host the web service - you trade off some monitoring and logging functionality baked into IIS but it doesn't require IIS be installed.

Here's an article on WCF hosting options - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332338.aspx

Answer 2

What about Apache Web services?