Application design Advice

[Guest]

I have a specification to do some very simple stuff on a PDA.

Basically, it will need to:

(all over gprs)

1) Receive jobs over from our server
2) Send back certain information about those jobs (ie. dates etc)

Would you use sockets for this or web service?

At the moment i'm using sockets and while it's OK it's a bit of a pain
opening the correct gprs connection and sending and receiving data..etc...

I'm thinking web services might be good because it will automatically dial
the gprs and it avoids sockets altogether.

Any opinions out there?

 

[Lebesgue]

If the application is not performance critical and you want to develop it
faster, use webservices.
There is some overhead with XML serialization and delays, but development
process is made very simple.
When using sockets, you get more performance, but many possible
implementation problems you have to deal with.

 

[Steve B.]

think about SQL Ce with merging replication.

It is quite ligth concerning acually transfered data and facilitate offline
scenarios.

 

[Guest]

Right ok i see...

Unfortunately the application does need to run as fast as possible and it
needs to be cost efficent as well, i'm not sure how much extra data it would
send if it was using web services.

Looks like i'm stuck with sockets and their problems.

Thanks