ASP.NET Web API is an extensible framework for building HTTP based services, it can be accessed in different applications on different platforms such as web, windows, mobile, etc. It works the same way as ASP.NET MVC web application, except that it sends data as a response instead of html view. It is like a webservice or WCF service, but the exception is  it only supports HTTP protocol.

As the name indicates Web API is an API over the web which can be accessed using HTTP protocol only. It is a concept ,not a technology. Web API  can build using different technologies such as Java, .NET etc. For example, Twitter’s REST APIs provide programmatic access to read and write data using which we can integrate twitter’s capabilities into our own application.

ASP.NET Web API Characteristics

1. It is an ideal platform for creating RESTful services.

2. It  supports ASP.NET request/response pipeline

3. It maps HTTP verbs to method names.

4. It supports different formats of response data. Built-in support for JSON, XML etc.

5. It can be hosted in IIS, Self-hosted or other web server that supports .NET 4.0+.

Author: STEPS