Topic: RESTful Data Services

Topic: RESTful Data Services

Even though WCF is a great technology for building web services, it contains a lot of overhead when passing messages between clients and servers. This is especially apparent when the client and server are passing data back and forth. Not only is the data passed, but also all the meta-data describing the data. Often the actual data being transferred comprises very little of the message being sent. Often all this meta-data is not needed and in fact strongly typing the data can cause problems when the client and server are built using different programming frameworks with different type systems. This is where Representational State Transfer- (REST) based services come in handy.

RESTful web services use simple communication over HTTP and deliver the data using plain old XML (POX) or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). Data is accessed and changed by using the standard HTTP verbs GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE. This makes it very useful for passing data from client to server in a loosely coupled way. This presentation looks at creating and consuming RESTful data services and is based on an excerpt from Dan’s most recent book “Beginning C# Object-Oriented Programming, Second Edition”..

Speaker: Dan Clark

Dan Clark is a senior BI consultant for Pragmatic Works. He is focused .NET, BI, and SQL Server technologies and training others how to best implement the technology. Dan has published several books and numerous articles on .NET programming and BI development. He is a regular speaker at various developer/database conferences and user group meetings, and enjoys interacting with the Microsoft developer and database communities.

Note: We will be having a raffle at the end of the session of Microsoft items, licenses and SWAG from Telerik...