I would like input on the design I currently have planned.
Basically, I have some number of external instrumentation, each of which should always be running, collecting specific data. My thought was to create a service for each, always running and polling the instruments, performing logging, etc. There could be one instrument, or there could be 40.
However, I need one application to consume all this data, run some math on it, and do the charting, display, emailing, etc. The kicker is that even if this application is not running, the services should constantly be consuming data. Also, these services should almost always be supposed to run on the same machines as the client application itself, but the ability to network them (like .NET Remoting used to do) could be an interesting feature.
My question is… is this the best design? If it is, how do I go about doing the communication between services and application? I’ve looked into WCF, but it seems to be geared towards request-response web services, not something that is continually streaming data to anything that might listen to it. Alternatively, should I have these services contact some other Web Service using WCF, that then compiles the data for use in a thin client viewer that polls the web service often?
Any links and resources would be greatly appreciated. .NET namespaces for me to research are also appreciated. If I wasn’t clear about something let me know.
Just a thought….but have you considered perhaps adding a backend database? All services could collate data and persist it then your application that needs to process the information can just query the database rather than setting up loads of IPC between the services.