I’m wanting to implement web services in my (C++ or C++/CLI) application so that it may communicate with another application (written in Pascal).
I’ve been looking around but can’t seem to find any definitive answers regarding this. It would appear that WCF is the implementation of this, but I’m not sure if this is the correct path (because I don’t want to read up on it in detail before knowing it is the right path) and whether it enables cross-language communication. Also WCF seems to require the use of IIS which seems unnecessary – presumably web services are implemented as a protocal layer on top of TCP/IP.
What I’m really asking is: is WCF the correct thing for accomplishing cross-language, cross-network communication? If it isn’t, what is? If it is, can someone point me in the right direction to learn more about it (I know there are a lot of resources, I just don’t really know where to start)?
Thanks very much in advance!
EDIT: Ok, so the web service is already created on a server. All I need to do is communicate with it. I’m told there should be a class defined in the .NET framework which handles this connection – basically, I get a header (or some file defining the method prototypes) and a URL (of the server) and pass it to this object and it creates these methods locally. Is this correct? How is this implemented? Thanks again!
Web services is awfully heavy weight to be starting out with. Maybe you’d be interested in Apache Thrift, Google Protocol Buffers, or maybe something with straight TCP/IP.
Though Pascal is going to be a rough language to find many bindings for. Which Pascal?