What is the equivalent of a Servlet (Java class that extends HttpServlet in tomcat) in an ASP.net project?

Question

I started programming my own web applications during the beginning of the Apache Tomcat project, and thus when I am writing a Servlet that responds with some small piece of JSON to some GET or POST my code would look something close to this:

package com.stackoverflow.question;

import java.io.IOException;
import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.http.*;
import org.json.*;

public class SimpleServlet_json extends HttpServlet {
  private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

  public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException, ServletException {
    request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
    JSONObject json = new JSONObject();
    try {
      json.put("Success", true);
      json.put("Name", request.getParameter("name"));
    } catch (JSONException e) {}
    response.setContentType("application/json");
    response.getOutputStream().print(json.toString());
  }
}

My question is "what is the equivalent method/design/New Item for ASP.net?"

I have been writing these as WebForms that look like this:

First the (basically empty) .aspx file:

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="SimpleServlet_json.aspx.cs" Inherits="com.stackoverflow.question.SimpleServlet_json" %>

Then this .cs file:

namespace com.stackoverflow.question
{
  public partial class SimpleServlet_json : System.Web.UI.Page
  {
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
      var json = new JSONResponse()
      {
        Success = Request.QueryString["name"] != null,
        Name = Request.QueryString["name"]
      };
      Response.ContentType = "application/json";
      Response.Write(JsonConvert.SerializeObject(json));
    }
  }
  [Serializable]
  class JSONResponse
  {
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public bool Success  { get; set; }
  }
}

But I secretly worry that I am asking my fellow c# programmers to adopt a non-intuitive style.

These examples are rather contrived, in practice they are used as the JSON representation of a database entity. For an example the URL example.com/product/1 is the HTML version (with a JSP or ASPx page associated with the URL) while example.com/product/1.json is the JSON representation (with one of these classes). I'm a fan of URL Rewriting.

Answer 1

HttpHandlers should do it in any version .NET version after 2003. see this Microsoft article.

However, a more modern (and more intiutive) approach would be to use .NET MVC or more specifically .NET Web API.

Quote from Scott Gu's blog on his asp.net blog:

"Our new ASP.NET Web API support enables you to easily create powerful Web APIs that can be accessed from a broad range of clients (ranging from browsers using JavaScript, to native apps on any mobile/client platform). It provides the following support:"

And the official Microsoft .NET Web API page states:

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.