[2.0] Design Recommendations

Hey folks,

You're dealing with a pretty junior developer here who's in an environment where I'm on my own for the most part. Having said that, here's my situation:

I'm working for a company that has an application uisng Oracle on the back end. Up until now, when they entered customer information, upon commit the Oracle app would call a Java based socket server that passed the customer address data off to a third party application for verification. Essentially if the address was inaccuarate and the application could, it would return a corrected address.

Recently the agency has decided to switch to a different application to fill this roll...so now the challenge.

The third party vendor wrote a COM based API to access this functionality. Because of limitations of the primary app, at least part of the process that will invoke this address verification must be written in Java (specifically JRE 1.1.8). What we've come up with so far is the following option.

1. Write a .NET web service and/or Windows Service (essentially a socket server) that will interface with the COM object and do the address verification process. This would reside on an application server (web or otherwise as dictated by architecture).

2. A small Java app would be written and wrapped up in an Orcale PL/SQL Stored Proc. The Java app would essentially stream an XML object to the .NET app, which would parse and appropriately convert the XML into the properties to be passed to the COM application. Once the verified address was returned to the calling .NET app, this would be streamed as XML to the Java app and passed back via that app to the primary Oracle calling process.

Since Java 1.1.8 doesn't have any built in mechanism to consume a web service, the XML parsing would essentially be manual on the Java side at minimum.

I wonder if we're not making this far more compliacted than we need to. Neither of us has worked on a project of this nature before, so we want to be sure that we're at least looking in the right direction.

Any advise or suggestions would be most appreciated.

Let me know if anyone needs more info.

Thanks,

Steve