Can my .NET Web Services be considered as a RESTful interface?

Question

Happy New Year.

I have a bunch of SOAP Web Services. They all have an HTTP POST and GET interfaces along with the SOAP interface. I believe POST and GET are offered by default when building SOAP Web Services in .NET/Visual Studio.

These methods either: (1) get information, e.g., provide your username, password and a transaction ID -> get an XML with your transaction's status; (2) create a transaction by providing your username, password and some data -> get an XML with your transaction ID.

My question is: would it be accurate to say I have a RESTful web service for those Ruby guys out there?

Answer 1

Well, it might be POX - but for true REST, the URIs themselves would be representative of the data being requested, such as /Orders/12345; is this the case?

Also - the data coming back would be data-centric, rather than operation-centric (which tends to be the norm for SOAP-based services). i.e. results would generally be directly related to data.

Note that you can create REST services in .NET with ADO.NET Data Services (aka Astoria). This is part of 3.5 SP1, and uses WCF under the bonnet. By default, full REST is available for Entity Framework, or query-only on any IQueryable API. But you can also enable full REST on LINQ-to-SQL (or anything else for that matter) by implementing IUpdatable. I cover this in a series starting here.