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48

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3

What would be a more standard way of notifying a web service consumer of a data change?

  1. Having the consumer periodically calling the web service to pull change notification.

  2. Consumer setting up a call back web service that can be invoked to forward notification about the change.

  3. Other?

+1  A: 

Both of these are options. There is also something called "comet" which is like setting up a stream between between the consumer and producer - messages can then be passed back and forth between the two. Wikipedia is probably the best place to start investigating to see if it will work for you project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming)

Todd R
StackOverflow really needs to fix their URL/markup-parsing algorithm.
Calvin
+1  A: 

Depends on the scenario. If you're working in a closed environment with only a few consumers of your service, you could switch to a COMET style service which allows a callback from the service to the client. More about that here:

Wikipedia - COMET

From what I've read, that method doesn't scale well in larger environments so I'd be careful.

The more traditional method is your first option of polling the service for changes. As long as your service performs well and you have the appropriate hardware to serve up the requests, it's probably your best bet for a public facing web service.

Justin Niessner
A: 

In case you weren't aware of it, and in case it helps: WCF can work with a Duplex contract that in effect creates a callback service contract on the client. It's fairly transparent.

John Saunders
Thanks John, in our scenario it is a mix of AIX based technologies, none of which is .NET.
Totophil