Greeting Folks, I have a company upgrading from 905 to 10, and they had an E-Commerce solution that had some Web Service hooks to Epicor in 905. The question they are facing as part of the upgrade is whether to tweak the existing Services to work in 10, or to redo them using REST. Question to the group: do we know if Epicor plans to sunset the WCF services, given that its REST capabilities are expanding by leaps and bounds? Have any other customers encountered the same thing, and which path did you end up taking? Thanks Much!
I would say you don’t have to worry about that any time soon. However since you are going to invest time into the upgrade anyways and converting form WSE to WCF is not trivial you might as well go REST.
Furthermore, even Microsoft is not moving WCF to .Net 5. There will be an opensource group who’ll try to implement a subset of WCF in .Net Core but I can’t imagine that Epicor would lean on that project. Go REST young man.
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All the above are fine answers but let me clarify a few topics.
First E10 integration against raw wcf is highly unlikely. The wcf raw payload used between client to server is proprietary and massively optimized. It’s not something you can integrate against.
The client and server serialization that does this serialization is managed in the contract dlls. That’s the first mechanism for integration.
The negatives of course are the requirements on deployment, os and framework dependencies.
The next approach is the Soap protocol support built in on the server. It’s a natural migration to the wse approach in E9. It supports either soap 1.1 or 1.2. No dependencies at the client. Any os or language or framework that supports soap and you are fine.
Lastly, the new feature a few years ago is the rest protocol. Rest is built for the web. Urls to describe intent. It is the basis of Erp 10 currently and will be the default going forward. Anything kinetic requires Rest.
That does not mean that other approaches are to be thrown away. There are no plans to do away with prior protocols. There is no need. The protocols are all wrappers over the business objects. These wrappers are all auto generated so neglible maintenance at high value.
Rest is the go forward as it is the basis of how erp is and will be built going forward. It’s advantages are documented elsewhere.
You choose by choose based on your needs
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