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copied!<p>Regarding moving to a multiuser application, centralising your data is the first step of course, and the simplest way to achieve it is often to use a cloud-based database, such as Amazon SimpleDB or MS Azure. You typically get an access key and a long 'secret' for authentication.</p> <p>If your data isn't highly relational, you might want to consider Amazon SimpleDB. There are SDKs for most languages, which allow simple code to store/retrieve data in your SimpleDB database using a key and secret, anywhere in the world. You pay for the service based on your data storage and volume of traffic, so it has a very low barrier of entry, especially during development. It will also scale from a tiny home application up to something of the size of amazon.com.</p> <p>If you do choose to implement your own database server, you should remember two key things:</p> <ol> <li>Ensure no session state exists, i.e. the client makes a call to your web service, some action occurs, and the server forgets about that client (apart from any changed data in the database of course). Similarly the client should not be holding any data locally that could change as a result of interaction from another user. Cache locally only data you know won't change (or that you don't care if it changes).</li> <li>For a web service, each call will typically be handled on its own thread, and so you need to ensure that access to the database from multiple threads is safe. If you use the standard .NET or Java ways of talking to a SQL database, this should be handled for you. However, if you implement your own data storage, it would be something you'd need to worry about.</li> </ol> <p>Regarding the question of REST/SOAP etc., a key consideration should be what kinds of platforms/devices you want to use to connect to the database server. For example if you were implementing your server in .NET you might consider WCF for implementing your web services. However that might introduce difficulties if you later want to use non-.NET clients. SOAP is a mature technology for web services, but quite onerous to implement, and libraries to wrap up the handling of SOAP calls may not necessarily be available for a given client platform. REST is simple to implement (trivially easy if you use ASP.NET MVC on your server), accessible by any client that can handle HTTP POST/GET without the need for libraries, and easy to test, so REST would be my technology of choice.</p>

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