Consuming JSON-RPC web services in .NET

Question

A business partner has suggested building a web services library with JSON-RPC rather that SOAP. (note they are not building in .NET necessarily, but I am)

I am a potential consumer of this data.

I've used JSON for client-based Ajax calls in the past, but this web services library will be used primarily for server-side calls and syncing large amounts of data.

I don't have much experience with JSON-RPC.

Questions:

• Can I easily build a JSON-RPC consumer in .NET?
• Are JSON-RPC web services self documenting and discoverable, like a SOAP WSDL?
• Can I easily add a Web Reference in Visual Studio to a JSON-RPC web service?

Thanks

Answer 1

Can I easily build a JSON-RPC consumer in .NET?

Shouldn't be difficult as long as you know what you're doing.

Are JSON-RPC web services self documenting and discoverable, like a SOAP WSDL?

Discoverable yes, documenting in as much as you can get function names and parameter lists. (not entirely sure what you're asking for as far as documentation goes).

Can I easily add a Web Reference in Visual Studio to a JSON-RPC web service?

I don't think so, no. (Though, I have no idea, it's possible. My experience with JSON-RPC is in PHP/JS mostly)

Relevant links:

• http://json-rpc.org/wiki/specification
• http://json.org/
• http://techblog.procurios.nl/k/618/news/view/14605/14863/How-do-I-write-my-own-parser-for-JSON.html

Answer 2

Check out Jayrock.

Jayrock is a modest and an open source (LGPL) implementation of JSON and JSON-RPC for the Microsoft .NET Framework, including ASP.NET. What can you do with Jayrock? In a few words, Jayrock allows clients, typically JavaScript in web pages, to be able to call into server-side methods using JSON as the wire format and JSON-RPC as the procedure invocation protocol. The methods can be called synchronously or asynchronously.

Answer 3

Can I easily build a JSON-RPC consumer in .NET?

Yes. JSON-RPC services are simple to consume as long as you have a robust JSON parser or formatter. Jayrock provides a simple client implementation JsonRpcClicnet that you can use to build a consumer. There is also a small demo sample included.

Are JSON-RPC web services self documenting and discoverable, like a SOAP WSDL?

No, there is nothing standardized but there are ideas being floated around like Service Mapping Description Proposal.

Can I easily add a Web Reference in Visual Studio to a JSON-RPC web service?

This can work if the server-side implementation provides a WSDL-based description of the JSON-RPC service but none are known to provide this to date.