Enable C application as Webservice

Question

We have an application written in C language which interacts with Oracle database. This application is an executable and runs on unix platform. We need to expose this application over http as web service for others to consume.

I thought of using JNI and CXF for webservice and run the application in tomcat.

Is this a right solution or there are other possibilities?

I found Axis2 supporting C language to write webservice. I have no experience of C language. Is Axis2 in C is good? What http server I can use to deploy the app? Would Apache webserver siffice in this case?

EDIT: The command line is not an option as though I mentioned its an exe but the part which I have to expose don't have any command line available and its bit hard as it needs complicated data structure as input.

Answer 1

It depends on a few factors. Vinko's method requires the app has a good clean command-line interface. Further, creating a new process for every webservice request will limit the number of requests that can be serviced. This may or may not be okay depending on how big the audience is expected to be.

If there's not that great a command-line interface and you want to maximize the number of requests you can serve, that then leaves you two main choices. Write the web service in Java, and call out to C with JNI or JNA. Or, write it in pure C or C++. The last is probably not advisable if the responsible developers don't know any C.

EDIT: Given that command-line is not an option, I recommend Java with JNI or JNA.

Answer 2

Consider using the Apache Foundation package Axis2/C. It is a pretty solid interface, though it still has slightly limited portability (works out of the box on Linux, but not on Solaris, for example - needs some tweaks).

However, since you say you don't have the experience in C, that may make it too daunting for you. On the other hand, you say the code you're trying to convert to a web service is in C (plus perhaps Oracle OCI); that means that you are going to find it hard to avoid learning some C to get things working.