Hello, I have a project i'm working on and I would like to have your input to know what would be the best way (simplest) to proceed since i'm not entirely sure how i will proceed yet. This post might be long The company i work for got a contract for doing all the email sending business of a client. The client is a newspaper and I'm in charge of thinking and developing a solution for they email needs. This newspaper publisher has a client base of about 100 000 clients. Our mission is provide a solution for their email needs. We have 3 functions: Billing notification (receipts), Renewing membership notifications (Dear Mr X, your membership is about to end. Please renew bla bla bla) and welcome emails (Dear Mr. X, welcome to the club. Click here to accept further communications) Basically, i have different email templates to use for those functions. I will received the data through a Web Service. On a regular basis, i must connect (invoke) to a WebService (provided by their Data Center) that will give me all the info about what i need to send (in an XML format). With this, i should know that Mr. X needs to receive his bill and he has to pay $y before xx-xx-xxx. I don't have to deal with the actual transactions. Just put a link where he can pay online (this link is already working) I would like to use an existing platform for managing email campaigns (free or not) to host on our dedicated server (Linux) that will take this data provided by the WebService and automatically send to the recipients using the right template. Do you guys have any solutions to suggest to me ? I MUST be able to automate all this process. It cannot be manual labour. I don't have a huge amount of time to build this. Ideally, this solution would also offer some kind of reporting, so we can see how well (or how bad) our campaigns are going. Additional technical info: 1. Server is dedicated for this and we have sufficient bandwidth. 2. WebService has been created by a third party. I will have to create a script (JAVA or PHP) to invoke it's methods and gather the DATA. The WebsService is ASMX : http://www.fileinfo.com/extension/asmx I have a WSDL that describes the structure of the data i will receive. http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl Thanks a lot for your input
The fact that they happen to be using a .Net service (or at least that is what the .asmx ending suggests) is irrelevant. If you have any experience at all of webservices you will be aware that WSDL describes the objects, methods etc that are exposed through the webservice. Were you using .Net you would simply give Visual Studio the URL of the WSDL and it would create all the classes and objects for you. You would then simply create the automated service that uses the precoded classes and objects. I am not highly experienced with the development tools for either Java nor PHP to know if any of them have such a functionality built into them to make the process so simple. If they dont then there are plenty of web articles on how to create SOAP clients in both of your preferred languages and you then will just need to manually translate the WSDL. Eg for PHP is http://devzone.zend.com/article/689