Instant Rest API from your MS SQL database? 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.
The promise is that if you wait with thinking about shared data until you know what business capabilities you need to offer, it will lead to a less database-oriented design. I think his approach is a good way to jolt you out of the database-driven mindset, but you need to be careful that you don’t end up designing a REST-RPC hybrid. What I also like about this approach is that it minimizes the interface and doesn’t expose all data by default, but hides internal data (like logging and configuration tables) from the client and instead focuses on what the client actually needs. This also fits beautifully with veteran API designer Joshua Bloch’s maxim saying that When in doubt, leave it out (from his highly popular presentation on API design), and it also harmonizes with the REST principle that a representation of a resource doesn’t need to look like the underlying resource, but can be changed to make it easier for the client. So feel free to think about what would be the easiest interface for the API user, and then let your resource take data from multiple tables and leave out columns that are irrelevant to the job that clients need to perform.
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. Discover more details on http://instantwebapi.com/.