Webservices Best Pratices

I have used webservices in a variety of ecommerce, enterprise, and mobile development enviroments. I thought of these quick pointers for Webservices Best Pratices.

• Make sure you version the your web services.

Webservices are often used for integration. Changing any deployed or used webservices will have significant impact on your clients. It would be disastrous for the method signature or data returned by a web services to no longer match.

• Use asynchronous model for web services communications.

Often webservices will perform some sort of business operation, which may take a significant amount of time to process. This time taken for processing introduces delays for users of your service. To prevent applications from use either a publish and subscribe method or a callback.

• Use caching for heavily accessed web services.

On certain web services, I have developed would be called millions of times per day. Even the WSDL on the apache axis 2.0 is generated dynamically. You might want to cache the data being returned or retrieved to improve the performance of your application.