Simplest way of updating SQL Server 2005 from a REST web service

Question

We have a job management application running (Access) with the database in SQL Server 2005. A third party is going to provide job information to us, which they make available as XML via an SSL web service using a REST style interface. The service needs to be polled automatically on a regular - 5 or 10 minutes - basis. The XML data needs to be pulled back and loaded into holding tables for onward manual processing - i.e. the problem is really confined to retrieving the data and loading it into tables.

I have complete access to the server and I can, within reason, deploy any software I wish.

I'm looking for advice as to my options for simple, reliable and robust methods of approaching this. Unfortunately the third party company effectively supplies no example code beyond a PHP class. Deploying PHP on the server is an option but the default PHP install on Windows does not support openssl, and I'd prefer a more elegant approach anyway.

What are my options?

Answer 1

The simplest way would be to write a bit of C# code to call the REST service and write the data into staging tables. Create this code in a Console application and run it periodically using Task Scheduler.

Answer 2

Try looking into the .net libraries? As for SSL support on php, its just a matter of just uncommenting a line in the ini file to get it working if I remember correctly.

Answer 3

If the 3rd party service is a "REST" service, I presume by this you mean HTTP based endpoints, why not just use HttpWebRequest to call the service and one of the many .Net Xml parsing libraries to access the response content.