Web services

Web services is an industry standard software interface which allows software applications to interoperate using standard interface specifications along with standard communications services and protocols. When NAV publishes some web services, those functions can be accessed and utilized by properly programmed software residing anywhere on the Web. This software does not need to be directly compatible with C/SIDE or even .NET, it just needs to obey web services conventions and have security access to the NAV Web Services.

Some benefits of NAV Web Services are:

• Very simple to publish (that is, to expose a web service to a consuming program outside of NAV)

• Provides managed access to NAV data while respecting and enforcing NAV rules, logic, and design that already exists

• Uses Windows Authentication and respects NAV data constraints

• Supports SSL—Secure Socket Layer

• Supports both the SOAP interface (cannot access Query objects) and the OData interface (cannot access Codeunit objects)

Disadvantages...