WHITE PAPER: SOAP / WCF vs. HTTP / ASP.NET Web API

SOA - SOAP – WCF camp vs. ROA - REST – HTTP - ASP.NET Web API camp: Which one to choose?

SOA - SOAP – WCF camp vs. ROA - REST – HTTP - ASP.NET Web API camp: Which one to choose? - Complete Whitepaper

Preview:

Connected Systems:

One of the biggest challenges / opportunities in the industry is the integration and reuse of the existing systems.  Connectivity (Connect people, organizations, and existing systems) through connected applications becomes the key factor in the software development.  Solution to this challenge lies on developing interoperable, loosely coupled, secure distributed application. 

Around a decade back, Web Services and other RPC style assist the developers to build distributed applications.  The Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) simplifies development of connected applications through a new service-oriented managed programming model.  WCF takes Web services to the next level by providing developers with a highly productive framework for building secure, reliable and interoperable applications that send messages between services and clients.  WCF is pretty much mature now with .NET 4.5.

At the same time, there is another camp/ community where started using REST (Representational State Transfer) which is another different, alternative architectural style for building resource oriented services. The REST architectural style was developed by W3C Technical Architecture Group in parallel with HTTP/1.1. The World Wide Web itself, based on HTTP, can be viewed as a REST-based architecture. . Unlike SOAP, Restful services simply relies on the HTTP application protocol verbs (GET – Fetch, PUT – Replace, POST – Insert and DELETE – Delete etc…). REST was initially described in the context of HTTP, but it is not restricted to HTTP protocol alone. RESTful architectures may be based on other Application Layer protocols, but in real time, it is only used with HTTP.

At this moment, REST approach is gaining upper hand because of its simplicity and reach. Restful services won’t require any proxies to consume and it be reached by a variety of device and client platforms. Microsoft have seen the increase in emergence of Restful services exposed over plain HTTP rather than through a more formal RPC style (like SOAP or WS*).  Microsoft already moved many of its implementations away from SOAP based technologies to REST. But WCF is not dead yet, it is still very well alive and in certain scenarios, it fit’s better than REST. Let’s discuss more around these two approaches and when, where to use.