Our system integrates with a third party web service. We need to throttle the total number of web service connections across the enterprise to this service to 30. I mentioned to my boss the idea of setting up an NSB endpoint as a gateway to the web service. He liked the idea so much that he wants it to be a generic gateway that can be used to call any web service at any URL, instead of being specifically for integrating with this particular third party web service.
My intuition tells me this might be a bad idea, but I can’t quite figure out why.
Is the generic gateway a good idea? Why or why not?
Hi Paul
I’m personally not a big fan of generic solutions because it tends to push the thought process down towards using generic messages. Once you are the message conversation flows becomes almost meaningless and very hard to grasp when things are going sideways.
I think though it really depends what generic means. For example, if you can come up with a good design that allows you to send and receive concrete messages but that infrastructure gets somehow genericly hosted within the same process it might be ok. So then it is really just a simplification of hosting and avoiding to deploy multiple endpoints. On the other hand, if you collapse too many things into one you might be suffering due to the constraint possibilities of limiting requests or adding specific behaviors that adapt to the requirements for calling a specific service. That’s why I would go with an integration endpoint per third party web service.
My 2 cents
Regards
Daniel