WebService or WebRequest for database updates in ASP.NET

Question

I'm currently making some system that will gather statistical reports from different sites, for any user transaction in there. My question is for would be better to implement from you experience ...

All websites that will report data to statistics sites are on my servers.

So whats better to user WebRequest to send GET data to page or to use Webservice for that...

thanks

Answer 1

to REST or to SOAP, that is the question! :).

Take a look at ODATA (wcf data services). I like rest for communicating between services and pages through javascript, and soap for communicating between services (in a SOA scenario), or between services and pages (that page in the server).

REST is more flexible but SOAP is, IMHO, more maintainable.

Answer 2

If you have small volume of input/output data a WebRequest would be better and probably faster, but if you need to pass complex objects a web service will be suitable because it will handle the serialization/deserialization of these objects you won't need to parse them in your code.