How can we connect with another applications to sharepoint list and read it's items?

Question

Can we connect to SharePoint list from another applications and read it's info items by web service? or another way ...?

In our windows based application or web based application we want to show items in SharePoint lists.

Goals:

• retrieve information in another application)
• access to SharePoint in another enterprise software
• Integrate Applications

/EDIT

we also have 2007 and 2010 version of sharepoint .

Answer 1

SharePoint exposes an API, and you can find there a service for accessing lists and the list items: ListData.svc a wcf service that follows REST protocol. Here's a link with a tutorial on how to do it: http://www.learningsharepoint.com/2010/07/09/get-list-items-in-sharepoint-2010/

If you are having trouble with the CAML query, use the CAML query builder from: http://spcamlqueryhelper.codeplex.com/

Hope it helps.