Should i read Webservices (SOAP)

Question

I am thinking about using web services (SOAP) for the web based Timesheet application. There will be around 250-300 people using this website.

Development Environment: VS2010 (VB.NET, ASP.NET with AJAX or telerik) and ORACLE

Office Environment: Web Server is in UK but users will be accessing this application through different countries. (Mostly from Europe but few users are in Australia)

In the past I have used web services for slightly bigger application. My plan is to use web services for data layer. I will be passing Oracle Store procedures value in XML format and then extract them within the store procedure. Web service function will call the store procedure and then return the dataset object to UI.

(All the database related functions (Data Provider and etc) will be in web services like connection and functions returning datasets.)

There will also be number of reports in this application especially for finance.

In future, I will develop few other (small – medium) size applications using this web services.

I am wondering if the web service will slow down the performance?

Answer 1

Of course using a webservice for data retrieval will slow down the performance of the application, because you add another layer. Data will have to be (de)serialized, which takes processing time.

What is the alternative? If you don't use a webservice, then you'll have to write the data access code in a separate project that your ASP.Net site will reference and use, but it requires a direct connection between the database server and your web server. If that won't be a problem: use the most direct approach. The less code, the less possible bugs.

If you however want the client to get live data through these webservices (eg via AJAX), or if you want to create applications that can run everywhere and refer to the data, a webservice definitely is the way to go.