Immediate Rest API from your MS SQL database
Few clicks 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.
Another advantage of SOAP is that it offers built-in retry logic to compensate for failed communications. REST, on the other hand, doesn’t have a built-in messaging system. If a communication fails, the client has to deal with it by retrying. There’s also no standard set of rules for REST. This means that both parties (the service and the consumer) need to understand both content and context. At the end of the day, the best protocol is the one that makes the most sense for the organization, the types of clients that you need to support, and what you need in terms of flexibility.
If you need to develop a REST API for a database-driven application, it’s almost irresistible not to use the database tables as REST resources, the four HTTP methods as CRUD operations, and then simply expose your thinly-wrapped database as a REST API. The problem is that one of the foundations of the REST architecture is that the client-facing representation of a resource must be independent of the underlying implementation, and implementations details should definitely not be leaked to the client, which is all too easy with the database-driven approach. It’s also important to ask yourself if an almost raw database is the best interface you can offer your API users? I mean there is already a near-perfect language for doing CRUD operations on database tables, it’s called SQL… And you probably have some business logic on top of those tables that your API users would appreciate not having to re-implement in their own code. So how do you move beyond this database-oriented thinking and closer to a more RESTful design for your API?
When I ran InstantWebAPI I get an error message about writing rights. How can this be fixed? If you created the stub solution as an administrator, then InstantWebAPI needs to be run as an administrator as well. We have a database with 80 tables. How many tables and views can this software generate the code for? This code was tested against databases with more than 100 tables. Web API project code gets generated pretty fast, but generating Unit Test code it might take a while. We recommend generating the code for a limited number of tables at a time. We have a database with multiple schema. Can the code be generated for all the schemas at the same time? No, this version of the software only allows generating the code for one schema at a time. Further customization can be added by sending a requests to Customer Service. Find extra details on Build and deploy your REST Web API in minutes, no code required.
