Related: "Microsoft's Web API Framework: Bridging the Divide Between Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC"
In an increasingly mobile world, it's becoming more and more important that developers be able to reach as many devices and platforms as possible. Connected services are increasingly common in not only the consumer space, but also in line-of-business applications and enterprise software development.
Simply put, apps and services are looking less like this:
And more like this:
These disparate devices and services are compatible with a wide range of technologies such as .NET with C# or HTML5 and JavaScript or Objective-C, and any number of languages and environments will be communicating together, against other services, and most importantly to you:
Your backend services become the most important part of your connected, data-driven applications. Whether you’re targeting mobile, enterprise, or web, it's important for you to serve and handle data in a way that:
- supports disparate platforms as endpoints
- uses existing standards
- scales to large usage
- easily maintainable and extendable.
WebAPI meets these standards by allowing a developer to craft RESTful web services inside the powerful ASP.NET web stack.
ASP.NET Web API
Web API empowers developers to create APIs and services using RESTful techniques by leveraging many different technologies that underlie ASP.NET. As an architectural style, RESTful services provide exceptional support for the concerns that I've outlined above, freeing developers to focus on functionality and quality.
Because REST makes use of HTTP and other web technologies, the ASP.NET web stack is the perfect place to create Web API web services. Because of the disparity between ASP.NET and Web Forms, Microsoft added the Web API framework on top of the existing stack, making it a peer to MVC in which the two technologies happily coexist within projects.
This lets developers take advantage of the full power of .NET, including the relatively new async/await keywords, to be used to create RESTful services that power all sorts of services and applications.
