Create ASP.Net Web API from MS SQL in minutes with Instant Web API? Daniel Jacobson, Director of Engineering at Netflix, writes in his influential API strategy book that REST should be the default choice for any new API you write today, and Google Insights reveals that REST overtook SOAP as the most popular API style in 2008, and has increased its dominance ever since. This pervasiveness of REST is one of its key strengths; you are not only choosing a technology, you are also joining an enormous ecosystem of tools, best practices and developers.

Benefits of SOAP Over REST. Still, SOAP remains the preferred protocol for certain use cases. The general consensus among experts these days is that REST is the typically preferred protocol unless there’s a compelling reason to use SOAP (and there are some cases in which SOAP is preferred). Because you can achieve most outcomes using either protocol, it’s sometimes a matter of personal preference. However, there are some use cases for which SOAP tends to be better-suited. For instance, if you need more robust security, SOAP’s support for WS-Security can come in handy. It offers some additional assurances for data privacy and integrity. It also provides support for identity verification through intermediaries rather than just point-to-point, as provided by SSL (which is supported by both SOAP and REST).

Use Subresources to Show Relationships: An attractive alternative to only using top-level resources is to use subresources to make the relationships between resources more obvious to the API user, and to reduce dependencies on keys inside the resource representation. So how do you decide what resources should be subresources? A rule of thumb is that if the resource is a part of another resource then it should be a subresource (i.e. composition). For example, if you have a customer, an order and an order line then an order line is a part of an order, but an order is not a part of a customer (i.e. the two exists independently and a customer is not made up of orders!) The idea with subresource is to make your API more readable. For example, even if you don’t know the API you can quickly guess that POST /customer/123/orders will create a new order for customer 123. However, if you end up with more than about two levels then the URI starts to become really long and the readability is reduced.

I see that this software is using Visual Studio 2017. Do I need a license for this product? No, as a single developer you can qualify for the free edition. You can download it from Microsoft site: Visual Studio Community 2017 I don’t have a license for Microsoft SQL Server. Do I need one? No, Microsoft provides a free download for SQL Express Edition server. You can get yours here. I see that a backup of AdventureWorks database is provided with the installation. How can I restore it on the server? In order to restore the backup file please download SSMS from this site: SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Once the code is generated am I able to modify it? Yes, by purchasing a license you should be able to modify the code however you see fit. Read more details on http://instantwebapi.com/.