I’m looking at doing my first mobile development using Mono Touch and Mono for Android. I’d like them to communicate with an ASP.NET MVC 4 site I’m designing. I’ve worked with WCF and WebAPI in the past but I’m wondering if there are any quantifiable advantages to using one over the other in this context?
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Here is a great article about that particular topic; hopefully this helps you out.
Is there still use for WCF? when should I choose Web APIs over WCF?
Recall my points from before – HTTP is a lot more than a transport
protocol; use SOAP across the board and consider HTTP as no more than
another way to pass messages.If your intention is to create services that support special scenarios
– one way messaging, message queues, duplex communication etc, then
you’re better of picking WCFIf you want to create services that can use fast transport channels
when available, such as TCP, Named Pipes, or maybe even UDP (in WCF
4.5), and you also want to support HTTP when all other transports are unavailable, then you’re better off with WCF and using both SOAP-based
bindings and the WebHttp binding.If you want to create resource-oriented services over HTTP that can
use the full features of HTTP – define cache control for browsers,
versioning and concurrency using ETags, pass various content types
such as images, documents, HTML pages etc., use URI templates to
include Task URIs in your responses, then the new Web APIs are the
best choice for you.
If you want to create a multi-target service that can be used as both resource-oriented service over HTTP and as RPC-style SOAP service
over TCP