Book Image

Hands-On RESTful Web Services with ASP.NET Core 3

By : Samuele Resca
Book Image

Hands-On RESTful Web Services with ASP.NET Core 3

By: Samuele Resca

Overview of this book

In recent times, web services have evolved to play a prominent role in web development. Applications are now designed to be compatible with any device and platform, and web services help us keep their logic and UI separate. Given its simplicity and effectiveness in creating web services, the RESTful approach has gained popularity, and this book will help you build RESTful web services using ASP.NET Core. This REST book begins by introducing you to the basics of the REST philosophy, where you'll study the different stages of designing and implementing enterprise-grade RESTful web services. You'll also gain a thorough understanding of ASP.NET Core's middleware approach and learn how to customize it. The book will later guide you through improving API resilience, securing your service, and applying different design patterns and techniques to achieve a scalable web service. In addition to this, you'll learn advanced techniques for caching, monitoring, and logging, along with implementing unit and integration testing strategies. In later chapters, you will deploy your REST web services on Azure and document APIs using Swagger and external tools such as Postman. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to design RESTful web services confidently using ASP.NET Core with a focus on code testability and maintainability.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Getting Started
3
Section 2: Overview of ASP.NET Core
10
Section 3: Building a Real-World RESTful API
19
Section 4: Advanced Concepts for Building Services

Introduction to the HTTP caching system

Caching is an essential part of web service development. The primary purpose of web service caching is to improve the performance of our system and reduce the overload of the webserver. Furthermore, fetching something over the network is slow and expensive, and so it is necessary to implement a caching system to improve the responsiveness of our web service and to avoid unnecessary additional computation. In this section, we will focus on some of the features that are defined in the HTTP 1.1 caching specification.

These caching specifications are sent by the webserver to the client. Whoever has ownership of the client needs to read the caching specifications and respond appropriately. In general, there are two common use cases for caching responses: the first one is when a web service exposes very dynamic content. In this case, the data...