RESTful Service Start Kit

I have been very interested in RESTful services, since it is a service based on HTTP Get, Put and Post protocol. Basically, you can use this service by using URL to provide your resources to end users with simple web protocol service. One way to explore the service is by using a web browser, which is URL based application to handle resources such as HTML and XML.

I have watched Pluralsight Screencast demos on Microsoft WCF REST Startkit. The Start Kit project was launched last year with Preview 1. Now it is in the stage of Preview 2. As MSD's artical: A Developer's Guid to WCF REST Start Kit, this new framework will be in the future versions of the .Net Framework.

However, what I tried the Preview 2 last week, I realized that some of template projects behavior differently from the version of Preview 1, as I saw in the Screencast. For example, one class of Service.basic.svc.cs is missing. From the class of Service.svc.cs I can see base class such CollectionServiceBase and ICollectionService but they are not available for editing. This makes it impossible to customized help descriptions, implementations and templates. Not sure if all these changes are available from other alternative classes or interfaces. I think I have to spend a little more time to read information about the Preview 2 and to get it work as I expected.

At the same time, I posted my questions about the change of Preview 2 and asking if there is other alternative Open Source based library available on StackOverflow. It seems like that there are very a few EST kits or libraries for .Net platform. One alternative is OpenRasta. It looks like that OpenRasta is very good package. Basically its architecture is based on three elements: resources, handlers and codec. Resources are information to be exposed to the REST service, handlers are HTTP handlers for GET, PUT and POST for various request patterns, and Codec is enCoding/deCoding of HTTP requests.

Though the person who provides OpenRasta is a very smart .Net developer, he has very limit resources, time and effort to move it out. So far it is not so widely used and it looks like that it does not support Atom and feed services. Maybe in the new release coming the next month, some more enhancement will be available.

I'll keep eye on this library and at the same time, I have to look at Preview 2 in a deep level. Enjoy exploring!