What issues to consider when rolling your own data-backend for Silverlight / AJAX on non-ASP.NET ser
- by Edward Tanguay
I have read-only Silverlight and AJAX apps which read static text and XML files from a PHP/Apache server, which works very nicely with features such as asynchronous loading, lazy-loading only what I need for each page, loading in the background, developed a little query language to get a PHP script to create custom XML files etc. it's pragmatic read-only REST, and all works fast and fine for read-only sites.
Now I want to also add the ability to write data from these apps to a database on the same PHP/Apache server.
For those of you who have built similar data-access layers, what do I need to consider while building this, especially regarding security so that not just any client can write and alter my database, e.g.:
check HTTP_USER_AGENT for security
check REMOTE_ADDR for security
require a special code for security, perhaps a list of TAN codes (such as banks use for online transactions) each which can only be used once, both the client and server have these
I wonder if there is some kind of standard REST query I should lean on for e.g. building SQL-like statements in the URL parameters, e.g.
http://www.thedatalayersite.com/query?insertinto=customers&...
Any thoughts, notes from experience, ideas, gotchas, especially ideas on tightening down security in this endeavor would be helpful.
