> > It's seems to me that a restful one would be the simplest in terms of > usage for all the clients (various tools and programs within the > organisation). > > Personally I find them easier to work with when coding to them as clients, > and I'll be writing the first client for this service too. >
I thought that the basic idea of SOAP was great and enjoyed using it in ASMX and the WCF basicHttp services for years. Using XML and a contract is fundamentally simple and sensible idea (except the payloads were shocking to look at). The wsdl and scvutil utilities generated all the plumbing for you and it was all strongly typed. This is still a good choice for strictly .NET clients and services, if you're luck enough to have them. But now the "dis-integration" of mobile devices of different brands has driven us to REST and JSON, and once again someone's hobby work or thesis has become yet another standard (you can't have too many standards!). Luckily there are nice libraries for various mobile platforms to make consuming REST services quite easy. Try creating an ASP.NET Web API project and building up your REST API. Then good luck discovering how all the "secret plumbing <http://gfkeogh.blogspot.com.au/2016/02/web-api-secret-plumbing.html>" works (as I call it). These things are miracle ingredients once you know how to use them: ActionFilterAttribute ExceptionFilterAttribute HttpParameterBinding AddQueryStringMapping *Greg*
