I've seen people building screen scrapers, pulling in remote URLs and parsing the contents, etc... RSS is so much easier. Even WDDX would work in most cases. Just wrap a security scheme around it and let 'er rip.
Of course is you need to auth. pullers of your feed against a members database, an XML Web Service would be the way to go. Just call your auth. method from the called function either returning content or an error status...passing the username/password as parameters when you call the function. I never really had a need to do this as of yet...but it is not difficult to do.
I have been researching 'Indigo' from MS a lot.
Some very interesting things are due for release in 2005/2006.
What I love most about XML Web Services is being able to keep most of the logic/code on my server. Let's say I build a desktop app that I want to lease to a client of mine for $50.00 a month.
I can either use an XML Web Service to check his membership before he runs the application...make sure he's all paid up....or even better...keep all major application functions in the remote XML Web Service and with each call to the service make sure they are a real client. Using this method you can track/count each User/IP address that uses the service.
If they abuse the app...or it runs from too many IP addresses...simply deny access to the main functions.
Of course...you can use this same system in Web Applications too...
Originally posted by lEricPl What I love most about XML Web Services is being able to keep most of the logic/code on my server. Let's say I build a desktop app that I want to lease to a client of mine for $50.00 a month.
I can either use an XML Web Service to check his membership before he runs the application...make sure he's all paid up....or even better...keep all major application functions in the remote XML Web Service and with each call to the service make sure they are a real client. Using this method you can track/count each User/IP address that uses the service.
If they abuse the app...or it runs from too many IP addresses...simply deny access to the main functions.
Of course...you can use this same system in Web Applications too...
It's all great until they spoof your host and provide their own XML feed and do as they wish with your program, kind of like SendSafe
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