SOAP and OData web services provide functionality over the HTTP protocol. This is fine as long as you consume the service inside the corporate domain and your data is protected from intrusion. If a web service must be available over the web, HTTP does not provide sufficient protection to ensure the security of your data. The HTTPS protocol is preferable is this case.
In this recipe, we will create a separate instance of a NAV server accepting authentication requests over the HTTPS protocol. This instance will be a web service access point for external users.
To run the example in the current recipe, you will need an SSL certificate installed on your NAV server and client computers. The process of generating a self-signed certificate for testing purposes is described in the Configuring NAV server recipe in Chapter 1, Writing Basic C/AL Code.