Yes, I do have some reasons ;)

The customer's constraints are that:

• the server must be a standalone Windows executable
• the *same* executable must be capable of running as a Windows NT service executable
• the server should not depend on other software

*My* constraint is that the same codebase (or close to) runs on Linux, so that I may eventually convince the customer to move off Windows.

More background:

Basically, this thing is a "Webservice Toolkit" specialised for this particular customer. The service listens on a single port for HTTPS requests in SOAP or JSONRPC format.

An authentication module is configured to take information from the request headers, body or SSL peer certificate attributes in order to check whether the client may proceed. The authentication information is then used to retieve "user context" from a database for the current client. That context is visible from exposed "service classes".

An (Apache-like) chain of Handler modules is configured for the service such that certain urls are mapped to a combination of an exposed "service class" and a service "handler type". (eg: https://service:2222/WholesaleBillingSOAP is configured to expose the Wholesale::Billing class via SOAP.)

Additional handler types exist for non-programatic access to the service. For this customer, the main *user* interface is a Macromedia Flex application (browser-based) which is served from the service at https://service:2222/sample/Wholesale.html. That Flex application reads an XML configuration file (also served by the service) to find out where the service is running, then talks to the service via SOAP.

Finally, the service includes asynchronous functionality that can be requested by a SOAP or JSONRPC client, which will run for a potentially long time (ie: reports which take minutes to run). Those clients can request a progress report or the final results of the long-running job.

I hope that clears up some of my motivation.

-David.

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