>>A few years ago I asked how to retrieve user information in a client application from our web server. The answer at that time was to create a web service; which I did, and works very well.
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>>Now I'm wondering, is there any other alternatives to this that I should be considering?
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>If you're already using Web Services and that's working you should stick with it. Web Services are probably more complex than other options, but once you've set up for it and you have a standard way of calling those Web Services you are in good shape.
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>There are other ways to build apps without Web Services. Recently REST has become much more popular and established which is basically Web Services without SOAP and discovery, but rather just sending raw HTTP (and mostl XML) messages. This can be easier to implement especially for FoxPro since you don't need to deal with SOAP related tools and it can be a lot more efficient both in terms of server processing and bandwidth used since you lose the overhead of all the SOAP packaging and parsing. The downside is that you'll have to do your own message parsing which isn't a big loss for FoxPro since the SOAP toolkit sucks for that anyway. With tools like wwXML or XmlAdapter if your prefer cursor usage you can very easily and efficiently convert complex XML easily (especially if you have VFP and your tools on both ends).
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>Many years ago before SOAP was around I used to send raw XML around between client and server apps - to this day I think that this approach can be much easier to work with than all the Web Service infrastructure. In fact, I just built an ASP.NET framework for a customer that uses this sort of mechanism for a FLASH front end even through Flash supports Web services and it was easier to do with the raw data both for Flash as well as for the ASP.NET app and the performance gain was quite dramatic when we compared both the REST and Web Services approach...
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>All that said, using a REST style approach is less standard than using Web Services and if you have third parties connecting to your data they might appreciate just pointing a SOAP client at the data and getting a result (although again with VFP this doesn't buy much since there's no complex type schema support in the SOAP Toolkit)...

Thanks Rick for your very detailed and informative reply. Extremely helpful. If I might follow up... does the new West Wind Web Connection support the REST option that you discussed?