Here you will find infomation on how to call Cyclos services from 3rd party applications.
The entire service layer in Cyclos 4 is accessible via web services. For a client to use a web service, currently, he needs to provide the username and password (according to the password configured on the Channels tab for the user configuration). It is planned for future versions to have access clients, which will belong to an user, being used instead of the username / password authentication.
The available service and API change policy is described here. In terms of security, web services are no more and no less secure than the regular web access, since the service layer is shared, and the same permissions / authorizations are checked in both cases.
Cyclos offers two types of web services: one for native Java clients and another one which is client-agnostic, using JSON requests / responses over HTTP. For the latter, a PHP client library is generated from the services, mirroring all services and methods in a PHP-friendly way.