How to use Core EF to build 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 REST Over SOAP. In addition to using HTTP for simplicity, REST offers a number of other benefits over SOAP: REST allows a greater variety of data formats, whereas SOAP only allows XML. Coupled with JSON (which typically works better with data and offers faster parsing), REST is generally considered easier to work with.
You also need to be aware that subresources cannot be used outside the scope of their parent resource. In the second example, you need a customer id before you can lookup a order, so if you want a list of all open orders (regardless of customer) then you cannot do it in the second example. Ehh, so what to pick? If you want a flexible API, aim for fewer subresources. If you want a more readable API, aim for more subresources. The important thing is that whatever rule of thumb you pick then be consistent about it. I mean the API user might disagree with your decision, but if you are using it consistently throughout your API, he or she will probably forgive you.
When I ran InstantWebAPI I get an error message about writing rights. How can this be fixed? If you created the stub solution as an administrator, then InstantWebAPI needs to be run as an administrator as well. We have a database with 80 tables. How many tables and views can this software generate the code for? This code was tested against databases with more than 100 tables. Web API project code gets generated pretty fast, but generating Unit Test code it might take a while. We recommend generating the code for a limited number of tables at a time. We have a database with multiple schema. Can the code be generated for all the schemas at the same time? No, this version of the software only allows generating the code for one schema at a time. Further customization can be added by sending a requests to Customer Service. Read extra details on Instant database Web API.