Messaging over HTTPS

Question

I'm about to start a project that requires XML messages to be sent between a couple of servers over HTTPS. A brief summary is this: I have an application in use by clients that will send information to a central server. That server will communicate these XML messages to another company's server. I will also receive messages back from that server and need to fan them out from the central server to the correct clients. My assumption is that I can write some pages that will receive the messages from my application, post them to the foreign server, and also receive messages from the foreign server, parse them and redirect them accordingly. Either side can initiate communications.

I have not decided on which language to use yet, the most likely seems to be ASP.NET.

I am looking for some further reading material, but since I am poorly versed in the lingo, I am having trouble locating it. Does anyone have some good places to start getting acquainted with what I am trying to accomplish?

Answer 1

I would start with looking at web services to look at the basic theory. Then depending on what sort of technology you are using I would then pick up an intro book on creating webservices in it.

Answer 2

Are the messages from the foreign server immediate replies to your messages? If not (either side can initiate a message whenever it likes), consider having both ends implement RESTful web services - the XML can be the payload, and https requests are trivially supportable.

Since invoking the web service is just an http request (POST, probably, from your description) there's good language/library support for this.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer

Answer 3

What language are you writing this in?

Initially I would say investigate web services, particularly SOAP - which is XML driven and will allow you to serialize your data and post it efficiently across apps and platforms (should you have multiple server/client platforms)

Depending on your language of choice I would recommend Asp.net webservices, it's excellent for easily creating and consuming webservices (particularly if you're using .Net actoss your platforms).