best way to communicate between .net and java

I have a .net application which needs to expose 开发者_JAVA百科a service consumed by a java client. The service can't be public. There should be some authentication mechanism for the client. What is the best way to do this? I'm new to web services and am confused by all the soap, wsdl etc. and have also heard a lot that it'll be a pain to get the two to communicate. Your thoughts?

Web Services are the one of the best approaches for interoperability over WEB. it's not that much difficult to create and use. It's as simple as Connecting to different databases and writing XML parsing in your code.

There are so many ways doing authentication. If you are using the IIS for deploying .net web services, then You can use Windows Authentication, Forms Authentication. These 2 are out of the box features of IIS. You can implement your custom authentication also. There are few compatible cryptography algorithms also for encrypting your data.

Without web services, it's very difficult to establish communication between Java ad .net.

You can give a try for JSON also. But i am not sure.

Hey check this video which gives you details. http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/java-jee/consuming-a-dot-net-web-service-using-java

I'd go for a simple REST interface using something like Jersey on the Java side, and a .Net JSON library to parse the data I consume.