I recently attended a presentation about the new .NET Data Services system, which allows you to expose your database via a REST service. This is apparently useful to AJAX applications that need to use HTTP for their calls but would rather put business logic 100% in the client than to just implement a Web Service with all of the logic baked into it.

Despite the ability to put security into the system, it goes against my entire career’s worth of learning to just put your raw data out there for a client to consume on the Internet — even if it is protected by a RESTful interface. What are your thoughts on this topic? Does it make sense, or is it lunacy?

J.Ja