On Sunday 21 May 2006 10:49, john dooley wrote: > Horst I didnt mean to imply you were against downloads. I also strongly > support standards based delivery and I totally agree with you on > everything except the bit about accessing my results delivery server > from outside with your own software ;) Would you let me access your > database from outside with my own software?
Wrong question - because I do not advocate "accessing somebody elses server". You stay away from mine, I stay away from yours, and we meet on neutral territory - with simple email as transport layer If we agree to a tried and proven protocol (email with SMTP for sending results / acknowledgements, and it is left to the respective side to decide whether they do the receiving end as POP or IMAP or whatever protocol) neither side ever has to worry about such things. Reports of any kind we use in medicine never depend on real time delivery, so it is a no-brainer staying away from the problems of real time messaging protocols. And voila, we avoided all these security and stability issues in one single hit. If your database contains anything of interest for me, you can simply send it. If you want to provide me with utmost comfort (ability to re-access past results, to search etc.) - see below for remote procedure call protocols via http. If for whatever reasons we decide we need real time messaging of some kind, it still wouldn't be a major problem if we'd use tried and proven SIMPLE protocols (like XML-RPC). Firstly, because you can then rely on tried and proven security mechanisms of your trusted http server for the transport layer, and secondly because you have a protocol that is very easy to lock down - because it is so simple. You are welcome to hit my XML-RPC services with anything you like - they will simply ban your IP number if you hit them with incorrect / malformed requests too often, but you cannot compromise the stability of my system by querying them (e.g. the drugref drug interaction service which was just a simple proof of concept gadget, got more than 10,000 hits an hour during it's heydays from people testing it, and lots of hits from some morons trying to wiggle their way into my system, but it never caused ant trouble at all). Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
