Is it possible to have a webservice over an Azure Servicebus?

Question

I have a virtual machine on Azure which will listen to messages over the servicebus of Azure. And another developer needs to connect to this servicebus to send messages to my service. To do so, we need to come up with some protocol for this communication system. And I was thinking about using WSDL to make the server something webservice-like, but instead of listening to the standard HTTP ports it would connect to the service bus and within it a topic with subscription, or whatever. I'm still not sure what would be best.

So, is it possible? Has anyone done something similar before? Are there some examples?

Answer 1

Service Bus provides both Brokered and Relayed messaging models. With using Topics/Queues you are essentially sending and receiving message to/from the broker. So you can use APIs/protocols that the broker supports. As an example you can use the NetMessagingBinding from your service/client to send and receive messages through the queue. There is no contract here other than what you put in the BrokeredMessage body and properties values. The application on either end can decode/decipher that info as needed.

In the case of Relayed messaging however you are making a end-to-end connection between the client and the service with Service Bus serving as the proxy in-between for auth, location-transparency and even load-balancing. So here you can use from a variety of RelayBindings such as NetTcpRelayBinding or webHttpRelayBinding but then both the client and the service need to be available at the same time. Here you need the service and clients to be using the same contract.