Create and deploy your REST Web API in seconds, no code required? Daniel Jacobson, Director of Engineering at Netflix, writes in his influential API strategy book that REST should be the default choice for any new API you write today, and Google Insights reveals that REST overtook SOAP as the most popular API style in 2008, and has increased its dominance ever since. This pervasiveness of REST is one of its key strengths; you are not only choosing a technology, you are also joining an enormous ecosystem of tools, best practices and developers.

Thanks to JSON, REST offers better support for browser clients. REST provides superior performance, particularly through caching for information that’s not altered and not dynamic. REST is the protocol used most often for major services such as Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, and even Google. REST is generally faster and uses less bandwidth. It’s also easier to integrate with existing websites with no need to refactor site infrastructure. This enables developers to work faster rather than spend time rewriting a site from scratch. Instead, they can simply add additional functionality.

Use Subresources to Show Relationships: An attractive alternative to only using top-level resources is to use subresources to make the relationships between resources more obvious to the API user, and to reduce dependencies on keys inside the resource representation. So how do you decide what resources should be subresources? A rule of thumb is that if the resource is a part of another resource then it should be a subresource (i.e. composition). For example, if you have a customer, an order and an order line then an order line is a part of an order, but an order is not a part of a customer (i.e. the two exists independently and a customer is not made up of orders!) The idea with subresource is to make your API more readable. For example, even if you don’t know the API you can quickly guess that POST /customer/123/orders will create a new order for customer 123. However, if you end up with more than about two levels then the URI starts to become really long and the readability is reduced.

Code will be generated into the initial stub Visual Studio solution. At this point the solution can be build and is ready to use. The solution should contain 2 projects; one for the actual Web API and another one for Unit Tests. Using the Unit Test project you can test the quality of the Web API that was generated. The Web API project should contain a referrence to Swagger UI, that allows for clear documentation and testing of the newly created API. Build an instant database Web API now, no coding required. Generate your Web API in minutes to build applications faster. Using Entity Framework 6.2.0 and VS 2017 generate your Web API for any MS SQL database. NEW – Use Core EF to build Instant Web API! Using Core Entity Framework 2.2 and VS 2019 generate your Web API for any MS SQL database. Discover extra info on http://instantwebapi.com/.