What are the benefits of a RESTful WCF service over a regular WCF service?

Question

I am new to WCF technology, I want to know what are the differences between RESTful WCF service and regular WCF services. What are the advantages of a RESTful service over a regular WCF service?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The REST service is based on the HTTP protocol. Each method call is an http, post, delete, or put request. Since it is an HTTP protocol, so anything that can talk on http can consume your services without much effort, such as javascript, C #, Java, whatever.

Also, the results of a REST request can be cached like regular http pages (by intermediate proxies or by a client computer) if you send the correct caching parameters with a response.

This is a friendly firewall and is fairly straightforward.

However, it is also more resource-oriented, while the regular WCF service is focused on RPC-style communication.

Regular WCF supports callbacks and many other things that REST does not support, but this is obviously due to the cost of compatibility and platform complexity.

Answer 2

A service that uses the REST architectural style is usually called a RESTful service or endpoint.

REST offers several important features and advantages over RPC technologies in many cases. Secondly, Microsoft migrates many of its own implementations outside of RPC technologies (such as SOAP) and REST. It has features such as caching, scaling, side effects, Idempotent, interoperability, simplicity

WCF is Microsoft's environment for creating applications that communicate over the network, regardless of style or protocol. The concept of WCF was to create an extensible and plug-in structure so that developers could learn the same programming and configuration model and apply these skills to different distributed systems.