usability of web services

Question

hi ppl im facing a design problem im hoping some experts here on the forum can help me out with. i have some experience with webservices but cant make up my mind on this one. my company is in the design stage of building a new appointment scheduling product. later on this will be part of a larger suite of products. currently for just the scheduling part of the application someone in the team came up with the idea of making all the server end web services based. the target deployment would be an intranet lan with one server and multiple clients connections using a client program (not via the web/browser) the fat client would use the web methods to retrieve all the required data from the database such as patient information appointment availability etc. thus we would have quite a lot of web methods serving up this information to multiple clients. the reason my team-members are in favour of this architecture is because security of packets and firewall problems are a non-issue because of the very nature of web services. they say that using authentication they can lock down the clients connecting to the server end the reason i do not like the idea of having all the web methods is because anyone can point a wsdl tool and build a client. also the way i understand web methods is that they are well suited for public information (example: a stock quote) but in this case the data is VERY private and any breach could lead to major legal issues. please advice thanx in advance

info · Answer

you can integrate various security measures into the client in order to prevent unauthorized access to your webservices. You might even design your webservices in a way that they will only interact with the special client you provide. Windows authenticication is only one way... How do you plan to create the client? There are various possibilities of integrating logic into a smart client that will disallow other clients to access the services. The simplest method might be user agent verification with a custom browser based frontend... many more Kind regards! Markus

rpalipi · Answer

Hi I would say it is perfectly good to use webservices methods for interanet applications with out any fears...provided that if you are using windows authentications.. In my application we are using web mehtods..in internet ..web services now not only for stock rate...now it has emerged into multiple uses..including..bulk data trnafermultimediasecure data applications (passing data is that VERY private using sslauthentication methods..still use of web serives keep on increasing Hope this clears you doubts... All the best Ramesh rpalipi@yahoo.com

pradeeps · Answer

Since your target deployment is intranet lan security can be controlled using windows authentication (https:// crypto  and other encryption mechanisms) webservices should not be a problem.