User895691971 posted
To me only WCF seems to be viable in the list. Any others please?
I start from this line of yours, quite accurate because WCF is a highly extensible and efficient programming environment. But in my own opinion, I think ASP.NET Web API would suffice for your needs here. Since you said that your data source may return a
record or a number of records (sending a million records is never efficient). Now, consider this,
The solution that I provide should be able to be used by several types of systems – Mainframe, JAVA based system, .NET based system,
WCF would require you to build up client systems against which you can communicate through WCF servers. On multiple platforms you will have to create multiple clients and some of them (even most of them) won't be supported at all. In such case, best solution
is ASP.NET Web API. Why?
- It works on HTTP protocol.
- Mainframes, Java applications, .NET framework programs and everything else can still communicate using HTTP protocol. Nothing special.
- It is a part of your web application.
- Simple MVC pattern is required to be known.
So in my opinion, Web API would suffice. I have built very robust and "real-time" (real-time in a sense where communication is two-way, not that real-time) applications and Web API has been what I wanted it to be.
Security considerations
Now for your security considerations, ASP.NET allows your controllers to be set up in such a way that only authorized clients and users are able to access the data otherwise there is an error. For example, the following code would be accessible by the members,
who are logged in.
[Authorize]
public class DataController : Controller // Can be an API controller
{
// Actions
}
This way, you can control who accesses the data. You can also use ASP.NET Identity to provide even more security and control who is accessing the data once they are logged in and log the details of those actions on your own system.
For more: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.mvc.authorizeattribute%28v=vs.118%29.aspx.
Tip: Do not push million of records on the network, unless you
really have to. Push a bunch of data and then, if needed, send more. 100 records are enough. You can encode your data in JSON and then send them to the clients. I am writing a guide about JSON in C# and once I have done publishing that I will
share the link to the free guide here, you can learn how ASP.NET Web API can send the data on the network in JSON formatted document.
