Using WCF to create an RQL client for Web Site Management

A few days ago, I posted about executing RQLs in version 11. I clarified that the currently shown
way of using some .NET objects instead of the old COM+ components, is just a temporary way till
the RDCMSCMSXmlServer Web Service has been implemented with the means of WCF.
I'll now show you in detail how to create a WCF based RQL client that can already be used from
CMS version 7.5 on, I guess. At least WSM 10.1 will work fine with this implementation.



All the steps can be done in around 15 minutes.
As a short outline, the steps are:
1. Create a new console application project in Visual Studio
2. Add a service reference to http://localhost/cms/webservice/RDCMSXMLServer.wsdl
3. A new XMLServerSoapPortClient is generated
4. Use the generated client to connect to WSM
5. That's it
Easy? Yepp, there's not much code you'll have to write manually for this example. As always, in
a real project, you'll have to do some additional work, e.g. creating a separate assembly containing
the client and additional convenience methods for sending certain actions. Probably making the
assembly COMVisible if it has to be called from your old legacy ASP code.

Using RQL in OpenText Web Site Management Server 11

Manuel recently posted (RQL Development with OpenText Web Site Management Server 11) about how to adopt plugins for version 11.

From an R&D perspective, I want to give some more details. Manuels examples actually do not use WCF. Instead, Manuel shows an example on how to currently (in the version 11 Technology Preview) execute RQLs. There is no WCF magic in it. It is just showing how to access some .Net 4 based wrapper objects to execute RQLs.

For the final release of version 11, we will replace the webservice that was previously available under the following url by a WCF based implementation: http://localhost/cms/webservice/RDCMSXMLServer.wsdl
This old webservice was using the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit 3.0. This is quite outdated and was never really supported on 64bit platforms. We will not change the webservice interface described with the WSDL.

The new webservice will be build using WCF, which is a core part of the Microsoft .Net Framework. The WCF based service will still be using the SOAP protocol. Heh, you will certainly say, there is still SOAP in it. Confusing, right? SOAP is just the protocol used and the toolkit respectively the framework used before is called the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit.

Regarding the performance:
At the moment, we cannot really compare it, but we would expect that using the WCF webservice should be faster than the old way of using a COM+ object that was than using COM Interop.

I hope, this makes it a bit clearer.