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Deployment

In a production environment, Genero Web Services becomes a part of a global application architecture handled by the Genero Application Server (GAS). The GWS DVMs are managed by the GAS.

This architecture takes care of:

• Security issues
• Scalability
  • Load management
  • Balancing of the SOAP requests amongst the available virtual machines
• Runtime monitoring

For deployment, the GWS Server application must be added to the GAS configuration.  See Adding Applications in the GAS manual.

You can:

• Create a GWS Server application that contains a single Web Service. This application could be deployed on various physical machines. A Genero Web Services DVM is created on each machine where the GWS Server application is executed, to manage the requests for a service.  A single GAS can communication with multiple GWS DVMs - the GAS daemon (gasd) handles load balancing among the GWS DVMs. Or each GWS DVM can have its own gasd.
• Create a GWS Server application that contains multiple Web Services.  The GWS DVM would manage the client requests, dispatching the request to the appropriate service.  Once again, there could be one or many GAS daemons communicating with the GWS DVMs.

Note: A Web Service Server must be stateless; several instances of the same Service can be created to support load balancing.

Deployment example

The basic deployment strategy can be implemented in varying permutations, depending on your business needs and the volume of requests.

• Using the World Wide Web, a Web Service client requests WSDL information for a particular Web Service from the Web Server.
• The Web Service client uses this information to make a Web Service request from the Web Server.
• The Web server spawns and communicates with the client CGI Connector, fglccgi. The Connector configuration is specified in the file connector.xcf.
• The Connector handles communication with the Genero Application Server, gasd. The gasd configuration is set in the file as.xcf (default) or a user-specified configuration file. The gasd must be started and listening for requests from the Connector.
• The gasd communicates with a Web Service DVM to fulfill the Web Service request.
• Communication is bi-directional, returning the requested information to the Web Service client.

Example

Accessing a Genero Web Service over the internet:

http://server_host_name/cgi-bin/fglccgi/ws/r/app_id/service_name