Web service allows single user only

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I need a little advice before I go to war with an outside company. I’ve been trying to set up an upload/download from a web service for several months and everything worked fine on the test web service, but when I went to go “live” well, another program was using it. All the time. Now I would naturally chalk it up to sloppy programming on the part of whoever set up the web service, but would there be a reason for this that I’m not seeing? We have several rounds of “hand-shaking” going on before it goes for the data, so it doesn’t appear to be a security issue. And I have been successful downloading from a live web service on a tutorial project so I know it isn’t me. Part of me wants to just hack in there, but I know this isn’t good business practice.

Any advice is, as always, greatly appreciated.

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…but when I went to go “live” well, another program was using it. All the time.

I’m not sure what you mean. Are you using a service that is available to multiple customers, each with a different key? Or is this completely dedicated to you? In the former case, is someone using your key, or is the server just under-resourced?

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Okay, let me try to explain a little better.

I’m supposed to create an interface between two applications – one is web service based, the other is server based. Both of these are third party products. A third application we have interfaces, although not very well, the server based application. I’m not supposed to do anything with that.

I’m supposed to call the web service, download xml code, and then convert this xml code to feed to the server-based application and also take data from the server-based application and upload it to the web service. I got everything set up and it seemed to work on the test web service, but when we went to go “live” (still need a bit of parallel testing), I could not call the web service. It was then when I found out that the third application is using the web service 24/7 and preventing us from downloading and uploading data, unless we turn off this third product. We can’t do this because the third product is better than nothing and we would be in big trouble without it.

Once we can verify that my application works, we would be turning this third product off, but we just don’t understand why we can’t call the web service some other way so we could use it the same time the third application is.

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…we just don’t understand why we can’t call the web service some other way so we could use it the same time the third application is.

Is it possible that there is a maximum number of threads/connections/requests permitted by the web service, and the other application is configured to use all of them? If that is the case, perhaps the application can be configured to use fewer simultaneous connections.

Alternately, could there be a security issue (e.g., simultaneous connections to the web service from different IP addresses rejected as spoofing)?

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I think it’s the first one(a maximum number of threads/connections/requests permitted by the web service, and the other application is configured to use all of them). I’m sure if it was a security problem, they would have fixed it. It’s a bit confusing, even to me, but as far as I can determine, there is a vested interest in continuing with Product C as far as Product A is concerned, and a lesser interest in Product B, or else Product C would have gotten their act together and be more efficient. And Product C has no intention of changing anything. This is why they want me to build a replacement for Product C.

Thanks for the examples!

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