Other team has one legacy system, which is data aggregators. It is implemented as web service using JAVA, SOAP,MTOM,Tomcat and Axis2. They have wsdl files defining functionalities such as search, retrieve data, upload, download.

Our team has a new developed website which is developed using RoR with mySQL. It is sort of social networking. Users can register, add friends, upload images, videos. Also, they can search data.

We are required to connect the two systems.

One possible solution I think is - Adding components into our website. The component invoke services on the aggregators. - Synchronize website database to the aggregators.

My doubts are: 1. How to add components in our websites? The components should use Java or Ruby or adapter from java to ruby. It is possible using ruby invoke web service. I think it should work since it is the point of web service. If so, can ruby call those services in wsdl directly? But how to deal with those different data structure?

1. How to synchroinze our database to the aggregators. I think the best way is also through web service invocation such as upload. That means, we have to export the db records into xml files and then write some tools to upload. The web service project support MTOM. So, it is fine to upload huge data.

Am I on the right record? Can anybody give me some hint. Thanks.