[Catalyst] Authentication for web services (slightly off topic)

[Ian Docherty]

This might seem like a stupid question, and one that probably has a 
simple solution.

If I am serving XML over HTML (a simple web service), how do I 
authenticate the client?

I would not expect cookies to be a sensible solution.

I could use Apache Basic Authentication, but I would prefer to hold 
usernames passwords in
a database rather than a htpasswd file.

That's about the limit of what I can think of.

The second question (and the reason why this is still on-topic) is that 
I want to have a web application
and a web service running from the same Catalyst application.

So, if I had a URL with a pre-path of http://mydomain.com/service then 
this would be directed to the
web services (with their own authentication) and anything else would be 
directed to the web application
(with standard username-password login).

Is it feasible to authenticate these using two different methods in 
Catalyst?

Regards
Ian