Hi everyone,

If you were going to create a solution to display Laserfiche information through a Java-based web server like Tomcat, what would you consider before deciding to write a Tomcat application using Laserfiche Java APIs or writing a web service (on a WIndows host, for eg) for said Tomcat application to interrogate?

I'm not chasing an an answer, rather points to consider. For example:

• Writing a web service will provide a re-usable wrapper for the LF APIs
• The Java API doesn't contain all the functionality of the .Net library; does the requirement automatically exclude the Java APIs
• Is it more secure to use SSL/Basic Authentication with a customer web service?
• Is it more secure to develop on the JVM?
• Deployment - which one is easier to maintain?
• Outages and Updates - is it generally easier to support web calls or update the published WAR files?
• Does is matter is authentication to Laserfiche is required? I think .Net impersonation of IIS will handle this for me so I can use a web service with no trouble. 
• Communication direction: What if the communication is read only from Laserfiche? What if the communication is two way (uploading documents)? Sure IIS can be configured to consume a POST containing a 32MB base64 encoded PDF but would you want it to?

I believe I'm better off writing Net webservice, hosted behind SSL and basic authentication rather than have someone else write something with the Java API. However, if there's other considerations, I'd be interested to hear them.

-Ben