Architect Consultant blog

I currently work for a customer that wants to expose its "services" to partners and other external consumers. They do not want to build websites themselves anymore, but instead have the services published and used by partners. So how can this be done? Always curious and looking for good solutions i started to think about this. I saw one of the following options: Just expose the (web)services through a web gateway and use http basic authentication over SSL for security Make REST adapters and expose those  Requirements  However soon i also discovered: Consumers have to be managed. You have to manage the client credentials. For a few consumers this is doable, but for a couple of hundred or thousands this can be cumbersome Consumers have to find the services somewhere. What is the functionality of those services? Is it soap or REST based? Consumers want to test the services within a sandbox before actually using them As a service provider you have to manage the