LightSpeed provides you with a number of options for building distributed applications, whether it is just providing access to your data to remote users or implementing a fully connected client/server style implementation.
When thinking about how you will design your system you will generally arrive at one of three approaches.
· You want to expose your data in a custom way. Rather than exposing the entities themselves to external consumers you want to describe Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) which will be populated from the data in one or more of your entities.
· You want to expose your entities directly, either through an RPC style API or via XML or JSON over a RESTful interface.
· You want to use LightSpeed from your client application but connect to a service endpoint rather than the database directly.
LightSpeed supports all three of these approaches.
Lastly, LightSpeed also provides support for exposing LightSpeed entities through RIA Services and Dynamic Data. You can find more information about building applications with RIA Services in the chapter on “Building Silverlight Applications” and you can find more information about building applications with ASP.NET Dynamic Data in the chapter on “Building Web Applications”.
