Professional design advice needed

[mazdotnet]

Hi guys,

We have an events page in our company that's database driven and we
need to shared it with our partners. They need to pull information
from our site. They can be running asp, php, .jsp..etc. I was thinking
of using a web services and returning datatable (maybe to XML). Is
that the best approach? Or should I just take it as a Url parameter
and return an XML file? Any suggestions here would really help me.

I really appreciate your input on this.

Thanks
Maz

 

[S.M. Altaf [MVP]]

It's an events page, implying that there'll be a listing of events and
information about those events. Will there be links to pages that display
details about those events too? If yes, you could make it an RSS feed.

 

[bruce barker]

To allow the broadest coverage I'd use the REST interface (Web 2.0). Its
getting much more popular then web services (for open interfaces), as they
are easier to consume. Its basically a url/xml pattern (your first choice).

the url mapping module in the .net extensions (still beta) is designed to
support REST. also the new SQL Server Data Services (cloud) is REST based.


-- bruce (sqlwork.com)

 

[Fernando Rodriguez]

I would go with the webservice, but instead of returning a dataset I would
return an array of structures (just create a class with a Title,
Description, and whatever other public properties needed and decorate it
with a [Serializable] attribute, and return an array of it).

That way it's easier to consume on other platforms other than NET.