Webapi is a reaction to attitudes as described below.
People were foregoing WCF due to complexity and a variety of other reasons. MVC was being used (with a bit of code) to produce simple JSON/XML Rest api's. The team took this onboard, altered their view of world as they were writing the Web Web Api and thus we have WebApi. As with most things, simplicity wins out and WebApi was the framework attempt at that. Ofcourse WCF can do REST too, you just have to twiddle a few hundred different knobs on the right way. I would argue WCF is not bullshit. WCF comprises way more than REST and has a very good feature set (albeit with a some implementation flaws). Support for MSMQ, TCP, ServiceBus etc. all via config is no easy feat. >> you want to do an intermittently connected app then use some sort of message queuing framework/system or roll your own And the circle of development life continues... - Glav From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of David Connors Sent: Friday, 1 February 2013 9:10 AM To: ozDotNet Subject: SPAM-LOW Re: WCF service best practises On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 7:23 AM, Craig van Nieuwkerk <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: ASP.NET <http://ASP.NET> WebAPI seems to be the new hotness. I don't have much experience with WCF, but everyone I talk to says it is too heavy and complicated. WebAPI tries to simplify things. WCF is a bunch of bullshit. People who use it just do so for the sake of adopting some shiny new technology - it is just pointless middleware for the sake of it. I don't understand why it exists anyway - as if we are some day doing to need to re-platform off tcp any time soon. If I needed to do a lot of IPC stuff today I'd just use rest/json like everyone else on the Internet. If you want to do something screaming fast, use protobufs. If you want to do an intermittently connected app then use some sort of message queuing framework/system or roll your own. I don't know why a common API needs to sit on top of a bunch of unrelated use cases, doing none of them very well. $0.02. -- David Connors [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> | M +61 417 189 363 Download my v-card: https://www.codify.com/cards/davidconnors Follow me on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/davidconnors Connect with me on LinkedIn: http://au.linkedin.com/in/davidjohnconnors
