We need to send and receive information via a web service or have A-Shell act as the web service. Is sockets the right way to go. Are there some already built tools that can make this happen. We have A-Shell 6.4 on Windows Server 2016.

You can use Fast CGI with Apache to launch A-Shell processes to handle requests. Directly opening a XCALL TCPX connection listening on port 80 is probably a pretty big security risk. Also, using Apache would let you have it handle TLS on port 443 if you desire an encrypted HTTPS connection.

Hi Tom,

To talk with an external web service you can use xcall HTTP, here are the examples in the documentation

Regarding the case where A-Shell is providing a web service, I think, the analyses starts on the environment where you want to run it, because if it's on a Windows Server, the interface to the exterior can be handled by IIS that, after validate the access, will call the A-Shell module to provide the service. We have something like that in a web portal where we use is an ASP .NET module that makes the bridge between IIS and A-Shell.

I concur with both Stephen and Jorge, with a few comments...

If the information passed to and from your service is completely without any security or privacy concerns (for example, you pass it a property id+ccyy and it passes back an array of 0's and 1's representing availability), then I would have a hard time visualizing the security risk of an open listening port. But in general, it makes sense to offload the connection management responsibility to a real web server, eliminating a lot of complications that your application would otherwise have to take responsibility for (launching your service, making sure it keeps running, HTTPS/TLS, security in general, scaling, load balancing, etc.)

If the service is low volume (say, less than about 20 requests per minute), and doesn't take much overhead to launch, you can get by with ordinary CGI. But for higher volumes and/or higher launch overhead services, FastCGI (see CGIUTL ) drastically reduces the per-connection overhead by eliminating the need to launch a new session for each connection.