I’m trying to code up Rails so that it can talk to the UK Government
Gateway using the submission protocol described here
Essentially it is an asynchronous request/response system that sends XML
messages over an HTTPS socket - fairly standard stuff.
Now assuming nobody else has already written this thing, I’m going to
have to know together some sort of library to handle to protocol. I
don’t think the standard SOAP or XMLRPC stuff will do the job.
Writing it in a synchronous form is of course fairly straightforward,
however from experience I know that the Government Gateway can take an
enormous amount of time to respond to a request (even with a simple
acknowledgement message), and I don’t really want the controller action
to block waiting for the Gateway to respond.
Is there a best practice way to code this sort of thing up?
TIA
Regards
Neil W.
Aldur Systems, UK