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I am new to REST. I was reading many article about REST. Still I am confused and do not know exact reason when we should go for REST rather than WCF traditional services.
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WCF is a best fit for scenarios like message queues, duplex communication, end-to-end message security, one way messaging, distributed transactions, etc. WEB API is a best fit to create a resource-oriented services using HTTP/Restful and it works well with MVC-based applications.
WCF is used for developing SOAP-based services whereas Web API is used for both SOAP-based and RESTful services. WCF does not offer any support for MVC features whereas Web API supports MVC features. WCF supports HTTP, UDP, and custom transport protocol whereas Web API supports only HTTP protocol.
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a framework for building service-oriented applications. Using WCF, you can send data as asynchronous messages from one service endpoint to another. A service endpoint can be part of a continuously available service hosted by IIS, or it can be a service hosted in an application.
You can use WCF to build RESTful services in . NET. REST (Representational State Transfer) is an architecture paradigm that conforms to the REST architecture principles. The REST architecture is based on the concept of resources: It uses resources to represent the state and functionality of an application.
I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, see this question which has pointers to many other interesting posts on WCF and REST. In terms of whether or not you need to expose a RESTful service at all, that depends on your application.
If you are building a public API, using REST with JSON or XML is popular in part because it's a very generic way to expose an API since clients don't generally need to generate code to use your API. Whereas with something like SOAP, code generation for the client is a lot more standard. If your clients are javascript, for instance, it's quite easy to use a RESTful service. If your API is only for internal consumption (i.e. you own the client and the server), then the benefits of REST are somewhat diminished, and it may be easier to use something like WCF.
In general, REST is a good choice when you don't mind being limited to HTTP, your service endpoints can be described well using RESTful concepts, you don't need a contract (like a WSDL), and when you don't want to worry that a client of your service won't be supported for technical reasons.
I've used RESTful web services as a reference in the past, it's a great book.
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