What is this REST API that I keep hearing about? I have been using WCF for years, but now the new buzzword is REST API for web services.
First, a good background found on this page: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/255684/Create-and-Consume-RESTFul-Service-in-NET-Framewor
What is REST & RESTful?
Representational State Transfer (REST) is introduced by Roy Fielding on 2000; it is an architectural style of large-scale networked software that takes advantage of the technologies and protocols of the World Wide Web. REST illustrate how concentrated data objects, or resources, can be defined and addressed, stressing the easy exchange of information and scalability.
In 2000, Roy Fielding, one of the primary authors of the HTTP specification, wrote a doctoral dissertation titled Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures.
REST, an architectural style for building distributed hypermedia driven applications, involves building Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA) by defining resources that implement uniform interfaces using standard HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE), and that can be located/identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).
REST is not tied to any particular technology or platform – it’s simply a way to design things to work like the Web. People often refer to services that follow this philosophy as “RESTful services.”
My current user case asked for three clients served by one codebase- one WPF client and two web site clients, and so I figured WCF was the best way to go. But I wanted to see what new tech MS has for us...
I saw many examples of REST Controller actions in MVC, but they were using REST architecture, over Http, without typed endpoints and instant Clients from WSDL, whcih was the main reason why WCF would have been so good for my case. WCF is so mature now that you rarely have to do more than click a few times and add some properties to a project config before you have strong typed client behaviors. What do I get with this new REST stuff? A lot of manual work and no strong typed objects. It sounds like a step backwards to me.
Phil Haack agreed with me...
http://haacked.com/archive/2009/08/17/rest-for-mvc.aspx
"When your service is intended to serve multiple clients (not just your one application) or hit large scale usage, then moving to a real services layer such as WCF may be more appropriate."
I finally found (the background I linked to above) what I was looking for in the WCF Starter Kit built on 4.0. It has strong typing, and automated client creation. It built REST on top of WCF and added some attributes you could decorate your WCF project with to work over a new protocol WebHttpEndpoint? http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/255684/Create-and-Consume-RESTFul-Service-in-NET-Framewor
This was what I was looking for, but since it built ON TOP of WCF I didn't see the point. To my point, Sam Meacham warned in Sep 2011 not to use WCF REST Starter Kit in the discussion on that page:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/255684/Create-and-Consume-RESTFul-Service-in-NET-Framewor?fid=1652761&df=90&mpp=50&noise=3&prof=False&sort=Position&view=Quick&fr=51#xx0xx
"The WCF REST Starter kit is abandoned, and will no longer be developed. WCF was designed to be protocol agnostic. REST services are generally built on the HTTP protocol, using all of the richness of http for your rest semantics. So WCF as it existed was actually a really bad choice for building rest services. You basically had to factor back in all of the http-ness that wcf had just factored out.
Glenn Block at Microsoft, who (with the community) developed the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) was reassigned to work on the WCF REST story at MS going forward. They are currently developing the WCF WEB API[^], which will be the new way to create REST services with WCF.
Also, keep in mind that REST has no service description language like WSDL or anything, so things like service location and automatic client generation don't exist. WCF certainly isn't your only chance for creating REST services in .NET. I created the RestCake? library for creating REST services based on IHttpHandler?. Also, IHttpHandler? is a very simple interface for creating REST services. A lot of people prefer to use MVC 3."
So, I conclude WCF is not going away, and is the appropriate tool for this case. the WCF Web API that I heard rumor about appears to still be in development, coming in MVC4.
I will look at that for a future project but not this one... http://wcf.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=WCF%20HTTP
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PS
Time passed, and I found myself playing with some Android development and wanted to hook up to some WCF service when I found out what is probably one of the big reasons why REST adoption is so strong- Android java libraries don't support SOAP well at all even with third party libraries!