Send a request to a server over another server, get response from the final server

Question

I am building a systems that consists of a gateway(server A) and a follower (server B). When a client sends a request to server A, server A will forward the request to server B. I want server B send the response directly to the client without bothering server A. I will basically use server A as a gateway.

Do you think this is a good programming practice?

Answer 1

Aside from questions about your communications protocol, I see a fundamental problem: How will server B know about your client. Server A knows about, because it was contacted by it. In a query response approach the client waits for server A to respond. Server A knows about the client because it received a request from the client. The client knows to wait for the response from A because it contacted it in the first place. B knows nothing of the client, only about server A. While server A could, in theory send information about the client to B, B is now going to have to able to connect to the client in order to send information back.

A better design is to let server A handle communications both ways and to use server B and any others to handle the work. When you system is to big for a single server A to handle, then you can introduce a load balancer to direct traffic to multiple server A's.