hi, i hope this place be the best one to ask this question.. this days, after some google searching to choose a portable communication mechanism between clients and server to develop my application with this view that i don't want to limit just in application for user interface, i want a mechanism that give me the chance & ability to use web interface for future development without any change in the server.., and also i don't want a complex mechanism.. and language specific mechanism.. and also can be used in other Operating systems.. i reached WebServices .. and mono for development.. guys,, do you have any other idea? please help.. best regards

Webservices and Java, you did say portability. Mono not portable and not really open (don't care what the Microsoft loving idiot "Miguel de Icaza" say's). [Modified by: blinky on March 04, 2009 01:16 PM]

WSDL & SOAP work well in a heterogeneous environment and has support in most languages in vogue these days. It is basically an XML RPC mechanism. Personally, I don't really care for it and developed a TCL-based protocol stream for a large-scale application framework that was fully object-oriented. These days I would probably use XML as the wire representation of the data instead, simply because it is so widely supported (though somewhat less efficient than the TCL-based wire format I used back in the early and mid-90's). FWIW, that framework is the backbone for the MES that runs about 80% of the semiconductor FAB's world wide. So, my recommendation? Use WSDL/SOAP and Java, C++, or Python for development. They run everywhere (I totally agree with blinky about mono/.net), are reliable, and are widely used and supported. Use of WSDL/SOAP allows all the participants in an operation to be written in different languages if desired or necessary, so Windows clients written with .net (C#, VB.net, whatever) can communicate with servers on Linux written in Java, C++, or Python - and vice versa that Linux clients can communicate with servers written in .net and running on a Windows Server OS.

hi, and thanks .. these are good reasons to take away mono and also to use SOAP/WSDL.. it seams that i should develop a SOAP server that should response to client requests. for C++, "gSOAP" may be a good secretary.. Any better idea?? .... NOW i have another question about security.. What is the best communication mechanism between clients and server?, i want to protect clients form "Man in the middle attacks" and also other attacks that may threat clients life.. i thinks ssh tunneling may be good solution. is right? , have any recommendation?.. thanks again

An encrypted connection would be best. You can use ssl connections that are pretty much impossible to break.

special thanks to Rubberman and blinky, Another question, its brainpower consuming for me ... Scenario: it's about client to database communication, i don't want direct connections from clients to database, i want to send data requests to my server and reply to them the requested data in xml format... Question: is this a good method or not?, what is the best mechanism for client data requests from the database in a client-server application? (for help: server is written in c++, database is oracle, and web services are the client-server communication mechanism), ...

WSDL/SOAP use xml data representations. Consider it a web-based RPC. It is probably the most commonly used protocol for web-based client-server interactions these days. Long before XML existed, I used the TCL wire protocol for LAN/WAN distributed system messaging. It is still used to run most semiconductor fabs these days, though most of the client-side code is using SOAP to a gateway that translates the XML to TCL and vice versa.