I'm currently looking to build projects for my portfolio, and it came to my mind that there are no web based API clients. Is there a reason for that? What would be the disadvantage in having them as a web application instead of a desktop application like Postman or Insomnia?
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I need to create an application (Mobile) and a Web application. It needs to use the same database so the same user authentication is required.
Can anyone give me such a demo or an idea where to begin.
I have looked into identity but I see that it is not compatible with Xamarin.
Expected result would be a cross platform login provider
my recommendation is to create one web service that can connect to the db and your mobile app and web app make http get/post calls to the web service. This also means you get to keep db logic in one place instead of duplicated across the applications.
The web app and mobile app should get some kind of authorization token (such as bearer) from the webservice to ensure no ones else is hitting the api.
I know this sound strange, but please bear with me. We have a legacy desktop app (DataFlex), and we are developing a new web app. Both apps share the same business logic. We are in the process of moving the business logic to a centralized project that is exposed as an asp.net-core web api, to be used both by the desktop app and the web app.
So far, we have been able to access the new business logic project from the legacy desktop app via COM, but because maintaining interfaces and DataFlex wrapper classes is a pain, we are hoping to find an easier way.
We could access the business logic using the web api via http. But many users are still only using the desktop app, and setting up web servers for all of them is not something that can be done anytime soon. So we want to call the asp.net-core project in a way that resembles the way a web app does it, passing method calls as strings (JSON?)
Is this feasible? If so, how?
I want to build a new mobile app backend. This backend might eventually support other types of clients such as desktop or traditional web application.
In the past for multi client applications I would use this stack of technologies. SQL Server -> Entity Framework -> TCP WCF Service Endpoint -> MVC Web Application or WPF Windows Application
I know I want my mobile client to be consuming a Restful Http Web API like the types you would host in the new Azure API product. But I'm not sure if I should still do the WCF layer or not.
Couldn't all my clients consume just the Web API now? Or would it still be wise to develop the WCF service and the layer Web API on top of that?
It just doesn't seem right to be using 2 different serialization technologies at the same time.
Yes, you could replace that with Web API and create a REST API but as Tim already mentioned on his comment, that is obviously just HTTP and not all the protocols WCF supports.
Having said that, API Apps have Swagger metadata to describe what the REST URIs (endpoints) can do (e.g. methods, content types, descriptions etc.). There are a lot of Swagger SDK generators which can read the Swagger metadata and generate the code you need to consume the REST API in your application for pretty much any language out there. For Visual Studio 2013 with the latest Azure SDK, you have this capability built in as well. This is pure code generation, no tight coupling or anything, we just generate the code you were supposed to write to consume the API.
I'm currently developing an HTML5 mobile web app for Blackberry using WebWorks that interacts with a 3rd party API.
Unfortunately i can't use the API directly from the mobile app due to the cross domain requests constraints, so i'm considering the development of a Web Proxy that interacts with the API and serves the web app.
Since I've never done such thing i would like to get some recommendations, i'm going to use Microsoft technologies (.NET) to achieve my purpose.
I'm thinking about a WCF service that makes all requests to the API and the mobile client connects to the WCF service to get the data, but i think i'll have the same cross domain requests limitation anyway so it might not work.
First, check with your third-party API provider if they support CORS. If they do, you can get around the same origin policy restrictions. Assuming they don't, you can create a facade service using ASP.NET Web API instead of WCF. ASP.NET Web API is designed from the ground up for creating HTTP services for broader reach and there is no SOAP involved.
From your ASP.NET Web API, you can make a HTTP call using HttpClient and simply pass the request to the third party API and echo the response back to your app. As you rightly said, the same origin policy restrictions will apply to this case as well but you have more control over the server side. You can implement CORS in ASP.NET Web API and that way your BB WW app can still call your web API despite being in different origins.
I have an issue that I am seriously struggling with.
I have a website, and a separate WebAPI which I want to be able to authenticate against each other. I was thinking that forms authentication would be best here. However, on my website, how do I go about calling the forms authenticated webAPI via a jQuery AJAX call?
Does anyone have any links or suggestions?
There is a discussion in this blog post on mixing forms authentication and basic authentication in Web API. You may be able to leverage some the principles in this article although it was tested with the Web API's residing on the same server as the web application.
If you keep the Web API and web application on separate servers your web application will run into cross domain issues and will have to support JSONP in your Web API. A possible work around for your website is to create a Web API locally on your web server which is just a facade to the Web API on the remote server. You incorporate the standard security methods on the local Web API, using AuthorizeAttribute, which in turn just calls your the Web API on the remote server. You can incorporate whatever security method you want to have for external users on the remote Web API.