Apologies if this is not the correct forum for this question...



I am evaluating app frameworks for our dev team and SF is one of the current front runners. However, try as I might, I can't see any discussion anywhere about creating web services using SF - it all seems very UI app focussed.



A large part of our business is providing web services to our clients for data exchange and for purchasing our products; these web services rely on passing XML documents containing the required data. It would not be practical to expose a web service serving up serialised SF business objects - this would be meaningless to the consumers of our services.



Does the SF toolset provide the ability to easily create XML web services built on the SF business layer in the same way that it facilitates the creation of Win/WebForms apps, or would such web services need to be hand coded?



Thanks.

Actually our web services are not that simple, which is why simply exposing business objects as a web service simply can't work for us. Sorry if my original question was not explicit enough...



The data we exchange with our clients might end up mapping (and not neatly) to a dozen or more business objects. Some manual parsing of the XML, BO instantiation and orchestration of the BOs into a business process will be required. So - I guess I am asking can SF help us with all of that? If so where can I see some doco or functional descriptions to help me understand this functionality?



Thanks.

I guess I wasn't very clear either.  Sorry.  I wasn't suggesting that you expose BOs in any respect.  You mentioned that you were expecting an XML file on the inbound and I also assume outbound responses and requests.  You can take these XML files that I assume that you are required to use, and then redirect that XML data into BOs. 

Obviously there would be your application logic and elbow grease to parse out the XML information as there is not going to be aby "pre-defined" logic within SF to know how to map that inbound data and traffic.  So what I would do in this case is create a single factory class that parsed the XML data and then placed that data into the appropriate "bins" or in this case BOs.

Like any application, you are going to have to create your application logic.  But the benefit of pulling that information out of an XML table into BOs would be that your data would then be scrubbed and managed properly once in the BO.  You would then gain all benefits of a tiered environment at that point.  I hope that is at least going in the right direction of where your questions are.

Thanks Trent. So if I understand you correctly, SF provides the business layer via BOs but it would be up to us to build the actual web service that uses them by hand?

If you are not using the Enterprise server, then yes.  That is correct.

And if we are using Enterprise Server? My impression was that ES serves up serialised BOs to consuming applications and provides data connection pooling... not sure how that provides us with RAD tools to write a web service?



Trooly rooly, if you can point me to some doco or something I can stop pestering you with these inane questions. I'm more than happy to read up on this, I just can't find what I need. Perhaps you have a developer's guide illustrating your approach to building a web service on Enterprise Server?