I’ll be giving a talk at Tech Ed this year on REST and how it can be implemented in .NET, much inspired by the thoughts of Jim Webber on good RESTful web services, and Garr Reynolds on the “Zen” presentation style. Here’s some more info:
Sydney Convention Centre, Darling Harbour
5 September 2008
10:15am – 11:30am
(ARC306)
REST has sparked furious debate, and reactions from fan-boy adoration to hate. As the arguments quiet and the dust settles, it is becoming clear that the RESTful style is a viable choice for the Enterprise. Framework support is growing rapidly. WCF now provides basic REST support. Meanwhile, the budding MVC framework opens the door to building services which leverage hypermedia. This talk will leave you with an understanding of the RESTful architectural style and provide you with recommendations on designing and building both simple and hypermedia driven web services in .NET.
Hope to see you there!
Craig Bruce
Hi… attended your talk at Tech-Ed on REST patterns and found it very useful/informative…
I remember you covering points on why REST with WCF is not a good idea but didn’t take notes 🙁 …
would you be able to point me to these reasons by way of reply or link?
That would be great ..thanks!
James
Hi Craig,
Thanks for your comment. WCF REST has support for choosing verbs and URI templates, and also nice support for ATOM. Astoria Data Services (built on WCF) give you a handy API for exposing your data via CRUD mapped to REST.
However, with WCF, it’s all based around serialised objects, rather than documents. This means you’ll have a lot of difficulty controlling your representations, and including links and microformats in them (ie, you miss out on the whole hypermedia and discoverability side of things). WCF will not give you control or access to headers and status codes, which are pretty important when building a good restful system. So yeah, I think the best option is ASP.NET MVC which gives you full control of routing, representations, headers, status codes etc.