I'm planning architecture for a web-based application using web services. It has been recommended that I look into using the ASP.NET MVC Framework. All of the information I'm finding on the MVC discusses its use with web pages, but I have found nothing regarding web services. Can the MVC be used for web services? and if so, where might I find resources to support my research effort?
ASP.NET MVC can be used to create REST web services. For SOAP, you should stick to standard Web Services.
MVC is a UI design pattern. It is not a natural fit to web services.
It's not clear from your question whether you're building a web application that has a web service component, or just a web service. Web services, strictly speaking, don't have user interfaces, so the MVC model wouldn't directly apply. But there's really no substitute for thinking through what you're trying to do in a straightforward way. Architecture patterns can help, but they're only guides. It sounds like you're still feeling your way around, so don't think too much about these sorts of patterns at this stage: figure out what needs to be done and find out what technologies would be best suited to do it with. The overall architecture will emerge eventually.
In order to dispaly data, You could use the mvc built in "JsonResults" to return all kind of entitles or collections in json format, I find it very practice.
If you need some more options I recommend you to use WCF instead of Web Service.
Related
I am quite perplexed over the use of Web Api in a MVC application being developed at my company.I recently joined the project and wondering why they are using this.The application uses JQuery AJAX functionality to pull data for each Tab in a MultiTab Page without refreshing it.
The application here is neither providing data service nor consuming any Web API service.This can be easily achieved without using REST verbs.It is directly connecting to database like a typical web application.
I am holding back myself to raise this question with the team since I haven't used Web API much but has a conceptual idea.
Am I missing something here ?
Microsoft's Web API MVC technology is typically used for external components to interact with the system - not generally a requirement for a standard MVC Web Application.
With that said, I'm not perfectly clear on the architecture. A few points of note:
jQuery AJAX is a perfectly valid (and usually preferred) method to retrieve information for tab pages - it provides a SPA (Single Page Application) "feel" to the site and generally improves performance all around. This does not mean that they're using a Web API
MVC is a framework used for many web applications, including Microsoft's Web API projects as well as ASP.NET MVC Web projects. The use of MVC doesn't mean that they're using a Web API.
A RESTful approach isn't just for Web APIs. Indeed, many find it a cleaner approach when using regular MVC Web Applications, as it tends to be more semantic to what actions are actually being performed (GET to get a view, POST to post data, DELETE, etc.) There's no real reason not to use REST verbs (which are actually just HTTP verbs, but called "REST" when we use them in a certain way). The use of HTTP verbs doesn't mean that we're using a Web API.
To conclude, The MVC Web API framework is it's own technology that's similar to MVC Web Applications, but more geared towards working with non-visual requests and responses, instead tailored to programmatic interfacing.
If this is indeed a Web API being used and not a case of MVC practices that you happen to be unfamiliar with, then yes, I think it's a good question to raise (at least from a technical standpoint - politically, maybe not, but we can't answer that for you).
A typical setup is to have multiple projects, one of which is a Web Application, which makes use of shared project(s) for domain/business classes and data persistence. Additionally, a Web API project is often used to provide access to the system for external components, but this is a separate "presentation layer" project from the aforementioned Web Application.
There may be cases where a Web API application is written as the core interface between the internal system and the rest of the outside world, where the MVC Web Application then interacts with the Web API, but this is a corner case that should only be done with specific reason, in my opinion (unless I misread, this seems to be the case you're stating?)
Using both MVC and WebAPI together in a ASP.NET Web application is quite common. Whilst you can provide HTML through WebAPI and you can provide JSON through MVC it's much cleaner to use the best technology for each.
WebAPI in particular lets you define an API once and then generates JSON, XML, ... for you based on the request.
Is there any use to work in MVC web service instead of asmx and WCF web service. Can anyone please tell the difference between the three?
About WCF web services and ASPNET Web Services (ASMX), You can find side by side comparision from MSDN : Comparing ASP.NET Web Services to WCF Based on Development
If you are making MVC Application you can use both ASMX and WCF web services, But I strongly recommend to use WCF Web service for any new development.
For information, I think the more suitable Blog regarding comparison is : ASMX Vs WCF
WCF vs. ASMX
Protocols Support
WCF
HTTP
TCP
Named pipes
MSMQ
Custom
UDP
ASMX
HTTP only
Hosting
ASMX
Can be hosted only with HttpRuntime on IIS.
WCF
A WCF component can be hosted in any kind of environment in .NET 3.0, such as a console application, Windows application, or IIS.
WCF services are known as 'services' as opposed to web services because you can host services without a web server.
Self-hosting the services gives you the flexibility to use transports other than HTTP.
WCF Backwards Compatibility
The purpose of WCF is to provide a unified programming model for distributed applications.
Backwards compatibility
WCF takes all the capabilities of the existing technology stacks while not relying upon any of them.
Applications built with these earlier technologies will continue to work unchanged on systems with WCF installed.
Existing applications are able to upgrade with WCF
New WCF transacted application will work with existing transaction application built on System.Transactions
WCF & ASMX Integration
WCF can use WS-* or HTTP bindings to communicate with ASMX pages
Limitations of ASMX:
An ASMX page doesn’t tell you how to deliver it over the transports and to use a specific type of security. This is something that WCF enhances quite significantly.
ASMX has a tight coupling with the HTTP runtime and the dependence on IIS to host it. WCF can be hosted by any Windows process that is able to host the .NET Framework 3.0.
ASMX service is instantiated on a per-call basis, while WCF gives you flexibility by providing various instancing options such as Singleton, private session, per call.
ASMX provides the way for interoperability but it does not provide or guarantee end-to-end security or reliable communication.
I can't top the other post on here regarding the merits of WCF over ASMX, it is from the source (microsoft), what I would add to that post as it fails to mention the MVC Web API, is this... your question really depends on the problem you are trying to solve. If you are trying to do messaging, message queues, or lower level tcp/ip it will still be WCF..
I'm a modern world programmer, as lazy as they come.. both ASMX and WCF technologies are starting to feel a bit dated to me, for example a typical WCF implementation will probably have a hefty XML configuration associated to it, if this is the way you are used to working then it will probably feel natural.
I like type safety and hate magic strings and further hate digging around in large XML, to my mind this is the path of the runtime error.
If you have used the MVC framework to create a web application then there is pretty much a zero learning curve to using the mvc webapi.
All the standard things like routes, models and controllers still apply in exactly the same way, all the HTTP verbs are there to be used...
With minimal effort all your routes and controllers can be used in a completely type safe way (no strings), so if it is broken then it probably doesn't compile....
Also it is much easier to write a unit test to exercise a controller than it is to unit test a ServiceContract
I'm not certain but I'd expect the MVC route to lend itself to IoC/DI better than WCF for the same reason above, but I'm prepared to be wrong on that.
Can you tell I'm biased.
This is a subjective question and with regards to the difference between the 3; WCF is more suited to communication between layers, asmx is basically what we used before wcf came along and due to the flexibility of mvc, it can be used in a number of senarios. WCF is however great for implementing OData services.
I personally use MVC to implement the web service on the client tier for AJAX interactions and have done so on several projects. The advantages are that I do not have a separate project and as such the front end stack is light weight and DRY, more efficient and organising code in this way makes more logical sense to me.
IMHO wcf has too large an overhead and is overly complex for simple JSON serialization. I personally think there is a case for using MVC in an n-tier architectural site instead of WCF.
This article looks at using this in the infamous NerdDinnerd project nerd dinner rest
There are several frameworks such as OpenRasta, but I find that the standard mvc.net tools are more than sufficient.
Also, a good article by haacked here: haacked.com
I'm on the core team that maintains ServiceStack - another very popular choice to build REST-based services on .NET / Mono.
Supports REST, SOAP and MQ based services
In addition to REST-based services you can re-use your same services to Support both SOAP and REST-based endpoints. ServiceStack also includes the .NET's fastest JSON, JSV and CSV text serializers. Here's an earlier answer comparing its advantages over WCF and WebApi.
Succinct, Typed, End-to-end API
ServiceStack also includes typed generic ServiceClients in all the major supported formats including: JSON, XML, JSV, SOAP 1.1/1.2 as well as the super fast binary ProtoBuf and MessagePack formats.
ServiceStack's generic service clients offer the most succinct, typed end-to-end client/server API without any code-gen.
ServiceStack Overview slides
The ServiceStack Overview Talk at this years MonkeySpace has a good intro into ServiceStack and its advantages.
I'm developing an ASP.NET MVC 3 application. I need this application to make use of an API I also need to implement. The API should both be available from ASP.NET MVC controller actions and Ajax. Now it is quite easy to make an API using ASP.NET MVC, but is it possible to use this from other ASP.NET MVC website actions? I guess the WCF is quite easy to use as it is just a service reference.
Other users of the API could be Windows Phone and iPhone.
Update:
Many only sees the API as a place where you consume data, but what about the part where you want to execute commands or do stuff, like add customer or change foo?
You may want to check our new WCF web API that was announced at PDC. We recently released a big upgrade. WCF Web API is designed specifically for allowing you to expose APIs to a range of clients in a pure HTTP manner. It is lightweight, offers a nice configuration story (no configuration files) and also is much easier to test.
You can download the bits at wcf.codeplex.com. It includes various samples, and there is also a set of NuGet packs for getting you started. Search for webapi.all on NuGet.
The way I like to do this is with RESTful controller actions. You can return JSON and use your calls with JavaScript on your own site. Other websites would almost certainly understand JSON and so they'd be able to consume your API pretty easily. This is much easier to write and test than a heavy WCF layer.
Check out this question for some example REST frameworks for MVC:
ASP.NET MVC REST frameworks
One of the newer ways of accomplishing data feeds is using OData. Scott Hanselman has a great introduction to it in Creating an OData API for StackOverflow including XML and JSON in 30 minutes.
It allows you to even throw LINQ queries into your URLs to retrieve exactly the data you need.
Open Data Protocol (Official site)
Open Data Protocol (MSDN, Microsoft)
WCF JSON binding was really terrible last time I used it. WCF also comes with all sorts of crazy rules about streams and how you have to use [MessageBody] attributes for everything.
It was a real PITA to me.
I knew I've answered something like this before:
What is the best way to implement a RESTful architecture in .NET today?
I would appreciate if someone can provide some insight into which one is more beneficial.
RESTful service in WCF can provide the same functionaly as ASP.Net MVC Controller, i.e URLS can be formed appropriately using Controller/Action.
Is there real benefit of using one over the other.
WCF Rest service will provide..
1) Cert Authentication out of the box
2) Logging
3) Message Headers etc
MVC
1) Different Action Results out of the box
If someone has used or debated these two technologies . please let me know
UPDATE:
I went ahead with the MVC Model as it gives me lot of flexibility and I can use the same action to render different views with CustomActionInvoker, which is really cool!!!
-RN
WCF makes your service more manageable and offers more protocol options like TCP, Named Pipes, PerChannel, and MSMQ.
WCF gives you the ability to specify multiple methods of binding to the service through the web.config including restful urls, giving you greater flexibility. In conrast, mvc provides you with the ability to easily construct resful urls and output data via code in much the same way as you do a web application, which is really easy and requires minimal additional knowledge if you already know mvc.
My recommendation would be to go with wcf if the service is really important to the overall solution, likely to be called in a different or many ways or has or is likely to have special security requirements.
On the other hand I would go mvc if this is meant to be a quick and simple isolated solution or perhaps is just providing a different representation of data being output in an existing .net mvc application.
At this point in time, your best option is ASP.NET MVC. It provides cleaner access to the HTTP primitives you need to be able to design RESTful solutions.
The only significant advantages of WCF Rest is the ability to self-host the service and if you want to use ADO.NET Data Services to deliver OData/Atom services, then obviously WCF is your best choice.
I'm developing a web app. This is more of a line-of-business app rather than a web site. I'm using ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server 2008, and I've purchased LLBLGen. I need to provide an some sort of API to third parties. For instance, if this was a medical app, third parties might need to CRUD patients, retrieve complex reports, engage certain kinds of workflows, etc.
What is the best way to do this with MVC without going to the architecture astronaut route. Do I need a whole "web service" type layer or can I re-use my controllers in MVC? Does it make sense to have this kind of API exposed through MVC? Optimally, I need a solution that involves the least amount of code repitition. I've found some stuff on doing REST with MVC but some of it is rather ambiguous and I'm not sure if it makes sense. I need a reasonable API but I'm not required to follow all the tenets of the REST religion or anything like that. I just need some sort of API in addition to providing the HTML front-end to the site, be it REST, SOAP, whatever.
Also, what are some options for dealing with URLs? Not everything in the app maps to something like site/products/product-id. Some of it involves engaging complex workflows, etc.
If you're going to have a web site and a web service then I would consider separating the data access and entities layers out from the MVC.
That way, your web service can do the same things that your website can. I would have a service layer that they both interact with. After which point the calls then go to the database and return the objects, and neither the web service nor the website should be able to interact with this layer.
This concept is also known as Separation of Concerns.
You can't/shouldn't reuse your MVC controllers in your web service. If they're so alike that they're indistinguishable, then consider writing your website to be a client of the web service, rather than being part of the same solution.