Web service Logging - Make or Buy decision - Part 3

When you start thinking about logging then, the next question that pops up in head is this - should I make it or buy it?

For a moment let's talk about a problem which is much bigger than the current decision about logging of web services.

"Make or buy" is a much bigger problem in managment, they are not just software decisions. Hundreds of articles are written in the same subject. There concepts can be reused in many software development scenarios. Here are couple of articles I found in google by searching for less than 5 minutes. :)

http://www.uwnyc.org/technews/v5_n4_a2.html
http://www.developer.com/mgmt/article.php/1488331

My only suggestion is that - don't make any strategic decision based on a short term thought. Particularly with web services the decisions that you make are going to haunt you for a long time. Simply because of the following reasons:
- the web services based protocols are in evolution,
- the web services based frameworks are not 100% yet,
- vendors are still trying to grab a piece of this cheese by releasing intermediate version of their offerings
- Power of Service orientated architectures is not fully understood and implemented to the optimal level.

The above statements are not exactly related to logging of web services, but they are relevent in the bigger SOA move that many enterprises are making. And I feel that the web services play a bigger role in this SOA move.( Also, making web services succesfully does not mean that you are strictly conforming to SOA principles).

So , my suggestion to you is this - think of SOA for your enterprise and locate the role of these custom ( built or bought) web services frameworks in the bigger context. Also, instead of making depratment level decisions about the web services, have an enterprise level committe decide these moves. This will avoid the mayopic decisions about web services, instead it will open your creative eye for business process reuse.

Now, let's come back to the real topic of the blog posting. "Logging in web services". For those who are not really interested in my above spiritual and vague ramblings.... Here is a very simple test code that uses SOAP Extensions to log the messages received by a ASP.NET 2.0 ASMX web services in SQL data base. Also, you can download the code from my web site. The code like this will solve a very simple and short term problem of logging. But, I suggest you to think of a good web services managment frameworks which is also going to support your logging of web service.