Querying Quickbooks from an ASP.NET Web Application

I'm trying to enable a web application I've written in ASP.NET MVC2 to be able to send and receive data to and from Quickbooks on-demand, without a delay/intermediate database/sync operation. (Please take this as an assumption; I understand that it would be a better idea to use the Web Connector and sync every X units of time, but that is outside of the framework of discussion for this question开发者_Go百科)

It seems that the only way to do this is to write a regular application (it apparently will not work at all from a service), and then have the webapp communicate with that application and send and recieve data through that application.

So my question is what is the ideal way of setting up an intermediate application that will communicate with the web app?

Should I write a regular console application and get data from standard output? Or are there better ways of accomplishing the same goal?

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QuickBooks exposes it's API through a COM interface and there are some limitations in how that can be used. An intermediate application that acts as an relay is an appropriate solution.

I would recommend building or using an application that listens over HTTP and proxies requests and responses to QuickBooks. In fact we use exactly the same approach in our product - RSSBus QuickBooks ADO.NET provider. Here are more details of what we do it in our product: http://rssbus.com/kb/help/RQR1-A/pg_qbconnector.rst