What is the difference between WCF Services and Web Services in .netWhen should I use WCF and when to use Web Services.Is REST and WCF service the same? Thanks
Web Service is an abstract term encompassing a large variety of data providers for distributed systems. Perhaps you are referring to ASMX web services, which can still be found in the wild but aren't really widely used in new development these days.
WCF Service is Microsoft's implementation of SOAP. There are others implementations or you could roll your own (not recommended).
SOAP is a kind of stateful, session-based, message-based web service. It's good if your service is designed as a set of complex actions.
REST is a stateless, sessionless, resource-based web service. It's good if your service is designed to access data and perform simple CRUD operations on it. SOAP and REST are mutually exclusive. A service cannot be both. There are ways to manipulate vanilla WCF to make is RESTful but these techniques are becoming deprecated. If you want to implement a RESTful web service there are two main choices in the Microsoft world: WCF Data Services and ASP.NET Web API.
REST is an architecture
WCF is a API in .NET Framework to build connected service oriented application.
In olden days a functionality developed as Web Service was accessible via internet and the same to be available on local network was available via Remoting.
Using WCF we don't need to develop different code for it to be accessible over internet and on local network. Just configuring it with bindings would be enough.
That is a very wide question...I am going to just give a brief high-level answer and suggest that you do some more searching as there are is already a lot written on each subject. But, hopefully this should give you a push in the right direction.
First, typically when people refer to WCF Services and Web Services, they are referring to the newer WCF conventions that make service calls fairly generic (they can be SOAP, REST, etc) and the old .asmx SOAP method of Web Services. So, along these lines, I would suggest looking more into WCF and SOAP/.ASMX for the difference of WCF and older Web Services.
As to WCF and REST, they are not the same. REST is more of an architecture, whereas WCF is a framework. As I already mentioned, WCF can be used to make SOAP calls or REST calls. I am not sure I can add much more without going into greater detail.
I will see if I can find some good articles on REST and WCF a little later, though. Personally, I do not see a reason to even pursue very far into the older way of calling web services (.ASMX pages) as WCF has pretty much made that obsolete. However, learning many different ways to skin a cat can be useful in an endeavor to find what fits you best.
Again, this is VERY high level, but these are very general topics with a lot surrounding each, so hopefully a high level overview will help direct you in studying deeper on each subject.
Some people mean "ASMX" when they say "Web Services".
Others just use "Web Services" to mean the generic technology, and consider WCF to be the current way to create Web Services on the .NET platform. The other kind are "ASMX Web Services", as distinguished from "WCF Web Services".
The "other kind" are a legacy technology, supported only for backwards compatibility. They should not be used for new development, so there's no point in you learning about them.
As others have stated, "REST" is an architecture style, not a technology.
WCF is multifaceted, so I'm going to speak of it with respect to its most common usage. The general difference between WCF and REST services is centered around the content. A REST call is usually more message/document/entity centered (With customer entities, find those starting with M; With order entities, get order 12 and is tied to the HTTP protocol. WCF tends to be more operation centered (Invoke find operation with params, Invoke get operation with parameters). WCF also isn't tied to HTTP.
FYI, there are extensions to create REST based services using WCF (WebInvoke, WebGet attributes).
Wcf:wcf is a technology as part of .net framework which provides environment to work with different distributed technologies an by following unified programming model.
wcf create a proxy.
wcf support data contract serializer.
records shown xml format.
**Rest:**Rest is an architectural style.which says use the existing features of the web in more effective,efficiency and simple manner.verbs like insert,update and delete.
Rest cannot create a proxy.
rest records shown jason format.
Web Service:a service which is hosted on website is called as webservice.
web service support xmlserializer
I see this is quite an old thread, but I have asked a similar question recently.
The answers given have all similar relevance, but in my opinion Ray was the closest to what was actually asked.
When designing or refactoring a web based solution, you always get the question should we go with SOAP or REST. The answer lies in the complexity of the business logic required behind the service. REST is good for simplistic API calls that usually contains small sets of requested data or over night processing with large sets, but mainly for data requests. SOAP is more of an interactive day to day service with business logic as well. For example many methods with plenty of parameters.
What we do as part of our web based solution, is to try and make use of both. For internal methods and primary functionalities we use SOAP, but for exposed APIs we prefer REST.
Framework related, definitely WCF as preferred choice, irrespective if SOAP or REST.
Related
Recently I've been working with MVC4 and have grown quite comfortable with the View > View Model > Controller > Service > Repository stack with IoC and all. I like this. It works well. However, we're moving towards company wide application platform that will serve the majority of all business applications needs within the company.
Basic architecture goals:
Client facing MVC site
Internal Admin web site
Plethora of scheduled jobs importing/exporting data/etc to third parties
Service Bus sitting in the middle to expose business events
Public API for customer consumption
My initial thoughts are to introduce an "enterprise service layer" by applying my service interfaces to WCF contracts and registering the WCF proxy classes in my IoC. This would allow me to reuse the same pattern I'm currently using, butt I've not found a lot of examples of this in practice. Except this guy.
Admittedly though, I'm unsure what the best solution is for a project this scale.
1) What are the considerations when centralizing business services?
2) How does this affect cross cutting concerns like validation, authorization, etc? I thought I had that figured out already, but putting DTOs between the layers changes all this.
3) I'm experienced with WCF, but I hear Service Stack is all the rage...Should SS be a consideration with its RESTful goodness?
This guy here. I am not an expert in this area by any means, but hopefully I can provide a bit more context around things.
The main problem with using IoC to resolve WCF ChanelFactory dependencies as per my post is that the client also needs to have access to the service contracts. This is fine for a View > View Model > Controller > Service > Repository type architecture but is not likely to be possible (or desirable) for a shared public API.
In an attempt to cover your other questions:
1) Some of the concerns are already mentioned in your second question. Add to that things like security, discoverability, payload type (XML, JSON etc), versioning, ... The list goes on. As soon as you centralize you suddenly gain a lot more management overhead. You cannot just change a contract without understanding the consequences.
2) All the cross cutting stuff needs to be catered for in your services. You cannot trust anything that comes in from clients, especially if they are public. Clients can add some validation for themselves but you have to ensure that your services are locked down correctly.
3) WCF is an option, especially if your organisation has a lot of existing WCF. It is particularly useful in that it supports a lot of different binding types and so means you can migrate to a new architecture over time by changing the binding types of the contracts.
It is quite 'enterprisey' and has a bewildering set of features that might be overkill for what you need.
ReST is certainly popular at the moment. I have not used Service Stack but have had good results with Asp.Net Web Api. As an aside, WCF can also do ReST.
I've previously provided a detailed explanation of the technical and philosophical differences between ServiceStack and WCF on InfoQ. In terms of API Design, this earlier answer shows the differences between ServiceStack Message-based approach and WCF / WebApi remote method approach.
SOAP Support
ServiceStack also has Soap Support but you really shouldn't be using SOAP for greenfield web services today.
HTML, Razor, Markdown and MVC
ServiceStack also has a great HTML Story which can run on stand-alone own with Razor support as seen in razor.servicestack.net or Markdown Razor support as seen in servicestack.net/docs/.
ServiceStack also integrates well with ASP.NET MVC as seen in Social Bootstrap Api, which is also able to take advantage of ServiceStack's quality alternative components.
I am new to REST. I was reading many article about REST. Still I am confused and do not know exact reason when we should go for REST rather than WCF traditional services.
I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, see this question which has pointers to many other interesting posts on WCF and REST. In terms of whether or not you need to expose a RESTful service at all, that depends on your application.
If you are building a public API, using REST with JSON or XML is popular in part because it's a very generic way to expose an API since clients don't generally need to generate code to use your API. Whereas with something like SOAP, code generation for the client is a lot more standard. If your clients are javascript, for instance, it's quite easy to use a RESTful service. If your API is only for internal consumption (i.e. you own the client and the server), then the benefits of REST are somewhat diminished, and it may be easier to use something like WCF.
In general, REST is a good choice when you don't mind being limited to HTTP, your service endpoints can be described well using RESTful concepts, you don't need a contract (like a WSDL), and when you don't want to worry that a client of your service won't be supported for technical reasons.
I've used RESTful web services as a reference in the past, it's a great book.
I'm working on adding a WCF services layer to my existing .NET application. This layer will be hosted in IIS and will be consumed by a variety of UIs, at least one of which will not use Microsoft technologies.
I can make a Web service in WCF that is consumed by my .NET application. However, I'm concerned about things that work in the .NET world but not with other technologies.
For example, simply throwing an exception from my WCF service works fine in .NET. But according to this article, one should approach exception handling with fault contracts to ensure compatibility with non-.NET consumers. The author labels this lack of foresight as The Fallacy of the .NET-Only World.
Does anyone have any high level suggestions or links to articles that cover interoperability between WCF and non-.NET consumers?
I realize I'm potentially working against the YAGNI principle. I'm only really looking to avoid things that will be incredibly difficult to overcome later when the developers of the non-.NET consumer report problems to me.
use any of the WCF bindings that don't start with net - avoid netTcp, netMsmq etc. - those are .NET only
make sure to make good use of DataContract/DataMember attributes, so that your method input and return parameters are easily and nicely serialized
avoid any .NET specific types in your data contracts - don't pass back an Exception or something like that - use the SOAP (or REST) elements for those things instead
don't use things like DataSet, DataTable etc. - they're all heavily tied to .NET
make sure to properly catch all errors on your service side - e.g. by implementing IErrorHandler - and pass back SOAP faults instead (if you're using a SOAP binding) or a HTTP error code (for REST)
TEST your services with non-.NET clients! Run a PHP page against them, code up something in Ruby - whatever - test it and make sure it works
One good way is to make your services RESTful.
From Wikipedia - Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web.
REST style web services leverage the existing capabilities of HTTP to expose the services. Since almost every technology of building software can deal with HTTP you can be sure that your web services can be consumed by any non-DotNet consumer.
A very good example of RESTful services would be the stackOverflow API.
Here are some good links you can start with -
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/javase/index-137171.html
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd315413.aspx
I have just started evaluating whether or not I should be using OData influenced wcf data services or a standard WCF service application as the primary data source for Silverlight applications. I would like your thoughts on which is a better way under what situation/circumstance. What is lighter over the wire, easier to maintain, etc.
What I have gathered so far is:
There are no Wcf data service templates in VS2010 that I know of, and I will need to create a asp.net web project first and then add a wcf data service, so its going to affect how I structure my projects.
WCF Data services expose actual table names over the service. I don't know yet of a way I can alias them and I'm not sure its a good idea to let the world know my table structure
In a standard wcf service I will need to write linq queries against the EF or Domain service classes on the service side, while in a data service I can move that processing logic to the client.
At first glance examining the classes exposed by the wcf data services seem easier to read and understand than those exposed by the EF
Do add your thoughts on this..
Thanks for your time.
There are no Wcf data service
templates in VS2010 that I know of,
Not project template - just an item template (for use inside an ASP.NET web site or web app). WCF DataServices are very tightly coupled to HTTP, so they only make sense in a web site/app.
WCF Data services expose actual table
names over the service.
NO ! At least not necessarily. The whole point of EF is that you can decouple the actual physical structure of your database from the (conceptual) model that gets exposed. You can totally rename entities, you can map several entities onto a single table, split up an entity over several tables, you can leave out attributes - anything you like!
At first glance examining the classes
exposed by the wcf data services seem
easier to read and understand than
those exposed by the EF
I doubt it - because by default, WCF Data Services will use a Linq-to-SQL or EF model as their basis, really. You can make that as simple or as complicated as you like.
Using a "regular" WCF service allows you to use the netTcpBinding for much faster performance (thanks to binary message encoding vs. textual messages for other bindings), when using your Silverlight 4 app in a company-internal network (doesn't work for internet scenarios) - not something you can do with WCF DataServices.
The main difference in my opinion is the SOAP vs. REST difference:
SOAP (traditional WCF) is oriented towards methods - you think and design your system in terms of methods - things you can do (GetCustomer, SaveOrder etc.)
REST (the WCF DataServices approach) is all about resources, e.g. you have your resources and collections of resources (e.g. Customers) and you expose those out to the world, with standard HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) instead of separate specific methods that you define
So both approaches have their pros and cons. I guess the most important question is: what kind of app are you creating, and what kind of user audience are you targetting?
Update:
for intranet / internal apps, I would think the advantage of a netTcpBinding (binary encoding) would justify using a classic WCF service - also for data-intensive apps, I personally find a method-based approach (GetCustomer, SaveCustomer) to be easier to use and understand
for a public-facing app, using HTTP and being as interoperable as possible is probably your major concern, so in that scenario, I'd probably favor the WCF Data Service - easy to use, easy to understand URLs for the user
I'm pretty much a novice as far as WCF goes and I'm trying to figure out which type of WCF project to create for use by my windows phone 7 application.
There seems to be :
WCF Service
Silverlight-enabled WCF Service
WCF Data Service
As far as I can tell - #1 is an older variant, requires more configuration and an interface. #2 has some switches turned on that are required by Silverlight. #3 Talks to an entity model.
I am using an entity model so #3 looks good, but the examples I have seen look like it exposes the whole entity model. I want to pick and choose what tables to expose, plus create my own service methods using linq to join tables. Can #3 do this?
#2 looks better than #1 as it does not seem to require an interface and seems to have less configuration.
#1 looks most configurable which is both a good and bad thing. I guess this is my fallback position.
Any advice?
Cheers
Steve
What you're running into relates to the fundamentals of Silverlight (at least as it stands today.) Your conclusion is correct - the "Silverlight-enabled WCF Service" is probably your best bet for a quick service to call from the Phone app, but I'd like to offer a different take on the rationale.
Silverlight only supports a subset of the communication options offered by WCF - it only allows BasicHttpBinding, whereas WCF offers a whole lot more, including support for "enhancements" that are part of the WS-* specifications. As a result, you need to set certain flags and make certain choices in your WCF services in order to make them consumable by Silverlight. By using the "Silverlight Enabled WCF Service" template, that work is done for you. This also means that if you want secure web-service communication with Silverlight, you have to use/set up HTTPS.
As to the interfaces, etc., actually that works across both options - the need for setting up the ServiceContract vs "implying" it from the defined operations came around .Net 3.5 SP1, if my memory serves me correctly. Note that while "regular" Silverlight also has support for communicating with TCP-based WCF Services, I believe the phone does not.
Now for choice #3 - the WCF Data Service (or the artist formerly known as ADO.Net Data Services.) What this does for you is sets up a REST-based service to expose your backend data (where the previous 2 options are more/usually SOAP-based.) More details and introductory information on this can be found here - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/bb931106.aspx. Now these services typically leverage plain old http, and are definitely consumable by Silverlight and the phone; also their payloads are lighter weight than the SOAP counterparts.
Whether or not to use REST or SOAP is a design choice - the SOAP approach is more RPC-like (define methods in the service that get called to perform specific actions with specific priorities), the REST option is more OOP-like, with some "auto-magic" thrown in for good measure. The thing about "auto-magic" is that you really do need to understand the magic (and its limitations) before you start, or your design could likely fail to meet your requirements.
Hope that helped!
John