Is there a .net solution for sending/receiving json other than IIS

Question

What I basically need is a small console application that listens on port 80 and is capable of putting json objects around.

• Receiving value types, objects and List<T> (or array) from a JSON client and converting them to .net classes
• Sending value types, objects and List<T> to the client
• Outputting some info to the console

Performance is not a problem I expect about 20 - 30 request per hour. I don't want the IIS or cassini web server as a requirement on the client side. Only my console app + dependencies.

I already tried servicestack.net which looks very promising and has an example for a console host. Howevery I din't manage to get JSON out of the console host (only xml).

Any ideas how to use servicestack.net or alternatives are welcome.

By the way: The client will be an Android phone and since my current approach IIS + WDSL + kosap2 (on the phone) causes more trouble than it solves so I really want to try a lightweight standalone JSON solution.

Answer 1

Maybe I'm incorrect, but I suppose you could use WCF hosted on a console app.

Answer 2

You could use a HttpListener to hande Http requests in your application. You would have to handle the Json serialization yourself, but that may not be a problem?

Depending on which framework version you are using you could use either the built-in Json serialization support or you could use the Json.NET library to do this. In either case it should be easy to detect the requests and to return a Json response.

Answer 3

The Kayak project does pretty much exactly what you want to do. Its very lightweight and very powerful, check out some of the examples (taken directly from the project page):

public class PostAPI 
{
  [Path("/widgets")]
  public Widget[] GetWidgets() 
  {
    return Widget.GetAll();
  }

  [Verb("POST")]
  [Path("/widgets")]
  public void CreateWidget([RequestBody] Widget w) 
  {
    w.Created = DateTime.UtcNow;
    w.Create();
  }
}

public class Widget 
{
  public string Author;
  public string Text;
  public string Created;

  // (methods would be here...)

}

It can automagically serialize and deserialize between JSON objects and CLR Objects and accept routes as well as both POSTs and GETs. Finaly, it includes a built in server that you can easily throw into a console app.