Immediate database Web API? Representational State Transfer (REST or RESTful) is a technical description of how the World Wide Web works. If to imagine that the Web is a device, and it could have an operating system, its architectural style would be RESTful. A RESTful API is a type of web server that enables user-operated or automated clients to access resources that model a system’s data and functions. A well-designed REST API entice developers to use the web service and is today a must-have feature.

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and REST (Representational State Transfer) are both web service communication protocols. SOAP was long the standard approach to web service interfaces, although it’s been dominated by REST in recent years, with REST now representing more than 70% of public APIs according to Stormpath. Understand the primary differences between SOAP vs. REST and how each can benefit your organization’s goals.

However, there are different opinions about if you should use links, or not… Vinay Sahni writes in his excellent blog post Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API that links are a good idea, but we are not ready to use them yet. On the other hand, the RESTful maturity model says that when you start using links you have reached the highest level of REST maturity. So what to do? Well, Dr. Roy Fielding, an expert on software architectures and the inventor of REST architectural style, flatly said on his blog that if you don’t use links it ain’t REST services, and he kindly encourages you to use another buzz word 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. See extra info at Web API code generator from MS SQL.