Two decades back, having a web presence is the way to captivate a large base of smart and tech-savvy customers. With the increased penetration of mobile phones, presently, the online presence is not enough to reach a larger audience as customer's search criteria have been shifting from desktop to hand-held devices.
To win the customers, businesses have started racing the mobile app race with which they can offer the services on all modern devices, browsers, and platforms in a simple and faster way. Here comes the role of web APIs like- Twitter, Facebook, Google, Chrome, and pretty more.
Web APIs are a great framework for building HTTP services and exposing the same over an arsenal of clients including browsers, mobiles, and tablets. Web APIs are akin to ASP.NET MVC, but not a part of the MVC framework. Instead, Web APIs are the part of the ASP.NET platform that’s an amazing platform for building REST-ful services.
Going forward, let’s outline the benefits ASP.NET Web APIs provides when leveraged for ASP.NET app development:
1) Empower the developers by handing over control over the way HTTP protocol messages are sent and responded to.
2) ASP.NET Web APIs provide a great level of abstraction with which developers can create the Web APIs that may encapsulate HttpMessageHandler.
3) Testing works like a pro as ASP.NET Web APIs use unit testing.
4) It provides ample flexibility in web API creation due to content negotiation and drives support for the ASP.NET routing.
5) Aid developers in returning a single type of serialization because ASP.NET Web APIs decouples the API code’s intent.
6) Unlike WCF REST services, there is no need to define tedious configuration settings for different devices.
7) ASP.NET Web API is the exact choice to look for to build resource-oriented services over HTTP that uses a set of HTTP features like- documents HTML pages, versioning and concurrency through ETags, and define cache control for browsers.
8) The architecture of web APIs is very light, which makes them a perfect alternative for the developers when they want to build applications for devices with limited bandwidth.
9) Web APIs are used to create non-SOAP-based HTTP Services, so if there is a requirement for web services, but not SOAP, then ASP.Net Web API is great to look for.
10) It’s simple, scalable, and robust because it supports all the MVC features such as routing, controllers, model binders, IOC container, action results, filter, or dependency injection.
Wrap up
ASP.NET Web API is not new to us, but for the newbie developers, it is. The detailed information about Web API is helpful to know about ASP.NET web development using ASP.NET Web APIs. The framework is highly used for impeccable ASP.NET core application development.