What is Web API?

ASP.NET Web API is a framework that makes it easy to build HTTP services that reach a broad range of clients, including browsers and mobile devices. ASP.NET Web API is an ideal platform for building RESTful applications on the .NET Framework.

Web API as the name suggests, is an API over the web which can be accessed using HTTP protocol. It is a concept and not a technology. We can build Web API 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.

The ASP.NET Web API is an extensible framework for building HTTP based services that can be accessed in different applications on different platforms such as web, windows, mobile etc. It works more or less 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 that it only supports HTTP protocol.

Since new versions of development tools are tested by the Azure team, it becomes easy for developers to move on to new tools. This also helps the developers to meet the customer’s demand by quickly adapting to new versions.