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Is Web API Restful

In this article, we will discuss – whether WEB API is restful service or not.

What Are Restful Services?

Rest (REpresentaional State Transfer) is an architecture pattern that contains following characteristics

It should use HTTP protocol for data communication.
Each component (functionality) in the service is considered as the resource and can be accessed using URI.

Is Web API Restful?

Now the question arises that web API is restful or not. Let us investigate both the points.

First of all create a sample web API. For this article, I am using the existing service that contains 2 methods i.e. Get and Post (See the following screen shot).

Click to Enlarge

Point number one says that a restful service should use HTTP protocol for data communication. For that run the application and open the developer tool of your browser (Press F12).

Once the tool is opened, click on record button to capture the network traffic (See the following figure)

Picture showing the developer tool of the browser to record the traffic

Click to Enlarge

Now navigate to the following link - http://localhost:19800/api/Test. The tool will capture following data communication

Picture showing the HTTP protocol used by web API

Click to Enlarge

In the preceding figure, the protocol is HTTP that proves our point number one.

The second point is each component is accessed using URL. In the sample service, we have 2 functions i.e. get and post. If we can access both the methods using URL then the second point is also valid for us.

To do that, open Fiddler and go to ‘Composer’ tab. In the tab, you can access both the resources by specifying the verb (Get or post) and the URL (See the following figure)

Picture showing the fiddler tool to check if the resources can be accessed using the URL

Click to Enlarge

So the second point is also valid as we can access both the resource using URI.

As both of the points are valid for web API, so we can say that web API is restful service.

Posted By -	Karan Gupta

Posted On -	Tuesday, January 26, 2016

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