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Open Source alternatives in .NET for building RESTful services
From: Pablo M. Cibraro (aka Cibrax) - 11/19/2008
Usually all my posts about REST are about WCF or mention this technology in some parts. Today, I decided to take a different approach and discuss some of the projects available today for building REST services, Resourceful and Dream framework (Both available for mono as well).
It is worth mentioning however that the WCF team has made an excellent work introducing the new Web Model in .NET 3.5, it has definitively helped a lot to adopt this kind of service in the .NET platform. In my opinion, there are still some aspects in WCF that could be improved,
- WCF services are hard to unit test. It is possible but requires some extra work. I already mentioned some techniques based on integration tests and mocks in this post "Unit tests for WCF"
- Poor support for defining multiple resource representations/formats within a single operation definition.
- Any aspect you would like to add here ?
Ok, I will try now to summarize some of available features or implementation details in these two projects.
Resourceful
- Service definitions are totally imperative. Whereas a service definition (and operations) in WCF is made declaratively through attributes (annotating classes with WCF attributes), the service definition in Resourceful is totally imperative, it has to be made through several lines of code.
LocalApplicationDescription app = new LocalApplicationDescription();