Book Image

Learning Microsoft Azure

By : Geoff Webber Cross, Geoff Webber-Cross
Book Image

Learning Microsoft Azure

By: Geoff Webber Cross, Geoff Webber-Cross

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Learning Microsoft Azure
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introducing a Web API


Using web services with client applications is common practice in many systems, as it allows clients to interact with data sources and other resources indirectly, allowing greater control over security and also allowing us to present data to applications in an application-domain friendly format.

The Web API (currently Version 2) is an ASP.NET framework for building RESTful HTTP web services (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer) for a wide range of client applications, including websites, desktop applications, and mobile applications (although Azure also offers dedicated mobile services that we'll look at in the next chapter). A Web API is simple to implement compared to other web service technologies such as WCF, which is designed for SOAP and requires complicated configuration. A Web API is similar to MVC, where we have controllers with HTTP methods routed to actions, but where MVC is used to build websites that interact with a web browser and...