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.

Excellent - thanks Dustin, you've hit the nail on the head exactly. We do not have control over the web service consumers - this would be our customers, using whatever applications they please to exchange data with us. The web service is the point of exposure to the outside world.



It's great that SF takes care of the business layer so neatly... I was just hoping for a little more on the web service side. Imagine having the power of your tools that create Win/WebForms to create a public facing web service - now that would be really cool (and something I really want)... I'm really tired of hand-crafting these suckers.



If you are interested in looking any further at this (for product development say) the Mere Mortals framework from Oak Leaf seems to provide just such a toolset; this may help you get a feel for what I want out of a framework from a web service perspective. So far I've only had a high level look at their product and will be drilling down deeper shortly. Not that I'm knocking you guys - you appear to do what you do really well, but this is a big hole for me. If you had an offering in this space I reckon you'd blitz the market.

Instead of going on a item by item break down of all of the differences here and trying to understand your application.  I will just say this and recommend actually creating a web service through the trial so that we have a more concrete discussion instead of theory and charts.

First, our ES server was created in the interest of performance and scalability.  As you have probably learned by now, we also have a very large high-end medical application that we sell and distribute that sits on top of StrataFrame.  So our entire framework (ES and otherwise) was created for scalability and taking advantage of remote data sources including the use of web services from the very beginning as this is a primary tool for creating a centralized data exchange or application server...depending on the needs of the app.  Additionally, it was created for extremely high volume and load balancing so that the size of the application can grow and be load balanced and all that has to happen is add servers to the farm.  This is something that becomes far more complicated with just dealing with WCF and standard serialization mechanisms...though, for smaller environments where this need will never exist, SF can do the very same thing that you referenced in your MM comment.  The only difference is that we do not have a template, which we could add, but is not something that is overly complicated to setup which is why we never have created this template.

Again, I highly recommend actually creating a sample application to make sure that your needs get met.  That is where the "rubber meets the road" versus a lot of talk and discussion anyway.

We appreciate you taking the time review StrataFrame and we look forward to helping as you work through your trial.

Thanks so much for your patient input and answers. You are absolutely right about trialling a framework - we will of course be doing just that, once we have selected a most likely candidate. We have a short list of three at the moment, of which StrataFrame is one.



I've been pretty impressed with the responsiveness of your support and the quality of the discussions I have seen on your fora - it speaks well of your company and your product. Keep up the great work!

Thanks for your comments and we look forward to working with you!