SOAP Requierments

Hi
I am developing a software that is supposed to pull out some data of an ACCESS local databse (on the client machine). Then it is supposed to send this data to a remote site that is running MySQL+PHP on a linux platform. Since remote connection to the MySQL and running SQL statements againest it from the client machine is out of question.

What do you think is the best approche to achieve my goal?

I am considering the following senario :

Develope a VB application that runs on the client machine and takes the data from ACCESS, then using SOAP to send this data to the server. a PHP script will pick up the request at the server, handle it and insert the data into MySQL.

My questions are:

- Is this the best approche ? isn't something more simple, straight fwd and no non-sense than SOAP?

- Isn't there any overhead on using SOAP or any other xml wire protocol for sending the data, especialy if we have 100's to few 1000's of data records at a time. And wouldn't be better to rather send the data in text file over FTP from withen the VB app?

- Are there any special requirements to impilement the SAOP michanizm on both server and client sides ? I beileve that at the client side we could distrbute some sort of DLL files with the software, but it would be very hard to ask customers to do server tweeking in order to run the system (isn't there any sort of PHP class or script to handle SOAP ?)


I know it's kinda lengthy, but I wanted to give you the whole picture as much as I can.

All help are much appreiciated.

AbuAnas

Hi AbuAnas,

> - Is this the best approche ? isn't something more simple, straight fwd and no non-sense than SOAP?

I can't tell for this one. There are many methods which you can use. (eg. SOAP, FTP, ODBC, EXPORT/IMPORT....etc). As long as you feel 'comfortable' with the method, that would be the 'best' one.


>- Isn't there any overhead on using SOAP or any other xml wire protocol for sending the data, especialy if we have 100's to few 1000's of data records at a time. And wouldn't be better to rather send the data in text file over FTP from withen the VB app?

For SOAP, I have a application running using SOAP on PHP and VB. Here are some of the problems I have encountered:
- Parsing a BIG XML is too slow. (Im using a 3rd party PHP XML Class made by http://www.phpxml.org/
- some charset is not supported by php XML. (eg. big5)

I think you should do some tests before you use the SOAP Approach.

I have enclosed a zip file for you, it includes a php file and a config file.
Simply place them on your WWW root, and they are needed for php SOAP.