Original post :
quote
Hi.
I'm looking for a server that has to hold many (web services) remote clients
for controlling them.
I want to do things like sending power off command to a bunch of machines
remotely.
The clients are usually windows machines behind firewalls NAT or web
proxies that only allow HTTP (this is why I thought of webservices)
The regular request-response fashion that servlet follows is not suitable
here since the initiator of the operation is the server.
What can I do in order to solve this and still use web services?
unquote
I'm not really competent to opinionate on whether Tomcat can do this or
not, but going back to the original description of the problem, apart
from the fact (maybe) that the "clients" are only accessible via port
80, I must say that I don't really see what this has to do with Tomcat,
or any standard HTTP server for that matter.
On the "client" side (the machines to stop), it looks like you would
need some process listening on port 80, able to interpret a limited set
of commands and do something local (stop/start a motor ?).
On the "server" side, you probably want some easy interface allowing you
to send such commands to the many "clients", efficiently and fast.
(I quote the "client" and "server" terms because I'm not quite sure
which is which here).
So I guess yes, to stop yourself from re-inventing the wheel, you could
use webservers on both sides as "containers" for this application, and
you could implement some kind of Web Service to do this, but isn't this
a bit heavy ? I mean that if you have a Tomcat on the client side, most
of the time sitting idle and just wating for the occasional request for
doing something, it is going to take quite a while for it to "wake up"
when it receives this single request, and to process it if it comes in a
SOAP envelope. And if your "server" each time has to wait for each
client to acknowledge the request before going on to the next one, it
will take it a while to loop through all clients.
But then, maybe speed is not the issue here. It's just that you were
talking about powering off a bunch of machines. I hope this has nothing
to do with preventing a nuclear war or so.
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