Please advise some solution for the following problem... We have a Windows based application with a database of products which must be syncronized with shopping carts (PHP+MySQL) installed on a web-server. There are the following complications: - we cannot access the server database directly, I mean we cannot connect from the Windows based application to MySQL on the server; - the database is pretty big, maybe hundreds of thousands of products and the sync must work fast and check if the data was correctly passed and stired; - the shopping carts installed on the server may have different database structures since they can be different solutions like joomla, magento, x-cart, etc. So, I think we would need a php-script that would work as a proxy-server getting data in some common format and putting it into the database taking into account its structure. The question is what format could be used for transffering the data so that it would be secure and relatively simple? How to make sure that some data wasn't lost? How to connect from windows-based application to php script? Sockets?
you can probably use SOAP or REST to run a webservice, i'm not an expert on both, but i'm sure they're the one you're looking for