title: Implications of migrating several systems over from direct JDBC to a RESTful Webservice
body: <p>Within my department we have around 20 or so applications which use direct JDBC to obtain similar sets of financial data from the same database. I'm looking at introducing a Service to expose this financial information and then migrate the various applications over to use the Service (rather than direct JDBC). The intent here is to have data access/manipulation logic in one place such that future changes to the data model are easier to develop and co-ordinate.</p>
  
  <p>Most of the clients are written in Java, with some written in C++/C# and a few shell scripts here and there.</p>
  
  <p>I've heard a lot of good things about REST and so am contemplating exposing a RESTful interface rather than say SOAP.</p>
  
  <p>So... I'm wondering what peoples thoughts would be with regards to a) Using REST in this type of scenario b) Scalability/Performance considerations moving away from direct JDBC c) Any other techniques / technologies which may be more appropriate for this type of thing. </p>