Create ASP.Net Web API from MS SQL in minutes with Instant Web API? Representational State Transfer (REST or RESTful) is a technical description of how the World Wide Web works. If to imagine that the Web is a device, and it could have an operating system, its architectural style would be RESTful. A RESTful API is a type of web server that enables user-operated or automated clients to access resources that model a system’s data and functions. A well-designed REST API entice developers to use the web service and is today a must-have feature.

SOAP vs. REST: Primary Differences. REST operates through a solitary, consistent interface to access named resources. It’s most commonly used when you’re exposing a public API over the Internet. SOAP, on the other hand, exposes components of application logic as services rather than data. Additionally, it operates through different interfaces. To put it simply, REST accesses data while SOAP performs operations through a more standardized set of messaging patterns. Still, in most cases, either REST or SOAP could be used to achieve the same outcome (and both are infinitely scalable), with some differences in how you’d configure it. SOAP was originally created by Microsoft, and it’s been around a lot longer than REST. This gives it the advantage of being an established, legacy protocol. But REST has been around for a good time now, as well. Plus, it entered the scene as a way to access web services in a much simpler way than possible with SOAP by using HTTP.

The promise is that if you wait with thinking about shared data until you know what business capabilities you need to offer, it will lead to a less database-oriented design. I think his approach is a good way to jolt you out of the database-driven mindset, but you need to be careful that you don’t end up designing a REST-RPC hybrid. What I also like about this approach is that it minimizes the interface and doesn’t expose all data by default, but hides internal data (like logging and configuration tables) from the client and instead focuses on what the client actually needs. This also fits beautifully with veteran API designer Joshua Bloch’s maxim saying that When in doubt, leave it out (from his highly popular presentation on API design), and it also harmonizes with the REST principle that a representation of a resource doesn’t need to look like the underlying resource, but can be changed to make it easier for the client. So feel free to think about what would be the easiest interface for the API user, and then let your resource take data from multiple tables and leave out columns that are irrelevant to the job that clients need to perform.

REST API from Visual Studio. Use your Visual Studio 2017 to generate initial code for Web API. Our product will automate repetitive tasks by generating entities, models and controllers to build a complete REST API. Visual Studio Unit Test: The quality of the generated code is always important. Instant Web API generate unit tests for all the tables used in the project to make sure that you get the best final version. Relational Database : The code generated includes foreign key checks for post and updates, so that will comply with data integrity. Also, it uses unique indexes to check for duplicates and in doing so avoids orphan records. Live API Documentation: Instant Web API uses Swagger UI, to provide you with interactive documentation. Live documentation allows a user to try out different method and parameters and see the request, responses in real time. See extra info on Web API code generator from MS SQL.