Why use an API

Today, a web-based application is not enough to reach it's customers. People are very smart, they are using iphone, mobile, tablets etc. devices in its daily life. These devices also have a lot of apps for making the life easy. Actually, we are moving from the web towards apps world. So, if you like to expose your service data to the browsers and as well as all these modern devices apps in fast and simple way, you should have an API which is compatible with browsers and all these devices. For example twitter,facebook and Google API for the web application and phone apps.

Web API is the great framework for exposing your data and service to different-different devices. Moreover Web API is open source an ideal platform for building REST-ful services over the .NET Framework. Unlike WCF Rest service, it use the full featues of HTTP (like URIs, request/response headers, caching, versioning, various content formats) and you don't need to define any extra config settings for different devices unlike WCF Rest service.

Features

1. It supports convention-based CRUD Actions since it works with HTTP verbs GET,POST,PUT and DELETE.

2. Responses are formatted by Web API’s MediaTypeFormatter into JSON, XML or whatever format you want to add as a MediaTypeFormatter.

Why to choose an API

1. It doesn't have tedious and extensive configuration like WCF REST service.

2. Simple service creation with Web API. With WCF REST Services, service creation is difficult.

3. If we need a Web Service and don’t need SOAP, then ASP.Net Web API is best choice

4. It is only based on HTTP and easy to define, expose and consume in a REST-ful way.

5. It is light weight architecture and good for devices which have limited bandwidth like smart phones.