Marcel de Koster

REST: ASP.NET MVC vs. WCF REST vs. ADO.NET Data Services

On the .NET platform we have several possible solutions to build a RESTful services. Three of them are:

• ASP.NET MVC (see Omar’s example)
• WCF (see WCF REST Started Kit)
• ADO.NET Data Services (which is build on top of WCF RESTful services API)

I have tried to figure out when to use which solution to build a RESTful service. Conclusion: I could not find a reasonable set of rules to determine which technology to use. Maybe this will be a start:

• ASP.NET MVC gives full control of your implementation of the RESTful service, but you have to build much plumbing code yourself.
• WCF REST provides REST functionality (including RSS and ATOM) out of the box. There is no need to do the serializing and deserializing yourself.
• If the service will focus on CRUD operations on Entities ADO.NET Data Services is good choice.

Feel free to add additional information on this topic.