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javaclientuser-registration

Java Client-Server communication to register a product

I'm looking for some advice on the simplest way to create some product registration communication. I have a Java desktop application that needs to be re-newed every year. When a user downloads and install this app (through JNLP) they get a limited demo-version. There is code in place on the client to "register" the product and unlock all of the features.

My next step is to build the server-side components. There will be a database with customer ID numbers and other information about the customer. When the user clicks register, some contact information will be sent to the server as well as some product registration ID. The server will check this against the database and then either give the client the o.k. to unlock the features or the user will be informed that the registration id was not valid. This seems like a very standard thing. So what is the standard way to do it?

I have my own VPS and I'm running Tomcat, so I'm really free to implement this any way I choose. I was planning on building some web service, but I have never used REST before.

Solution

  • Use REST; REST is nothing more than using plain HTTP 'better'. Since you are already using HTTP, somehow you are already doing REST like calls and moving these calls to full fledged REST will be easy.

    Implementing REST calls is easy. You have two approaches:

    • Low end: using URLConnection objects on the client, servlets on the server and following some REST conventions on using HTTP methods and 'clean' URLs (see here). Advantage is that you need no 3rd party library and minimize the footprint. Maintenance and evolutions are harder though.
    • High-end: a framework and specifications like JAX-RS. Using Restlet you can be up in running with a REST server in a couple of hours without having to deploy a servlet container.

    Don't use SOAP. The only reason you would want to use SOAP is that you want to contractualise using a WSDL what you are exposing (you can do the same with REST btw, see the Amazon documentation for instance). Trust me, SOAP is way too heavy and confusing for what you are trying to do.