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We are having existing software developed on .NET Framework 2.0. It interacts with SOAP based web services for different tasks.

We are planning to switch existing web service to be based on either Web API or SignalR. And also we are having plan to move web services on Amazon cloud.

I would like to know which technology should be use in terms of comparatively best?

Sam M
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Vikram
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  • Web API is totally different from SignalR – A.T. Dec 17 '13 at 12:06
  • While searching I got link- http://blogs.telerik.com/jefffritz/posts/13-10-08/async-data-with-signalr that speaks them in relation. – Vikram Dec 17 '13 at 16:00
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    @V.S.Saini - I skim-read the post. It's not a good source of information. One can not win over the other because they aren't used to solve the same problems. SignalR is used for two-way communication between client and server. This means it solves things like chat. http://jabbr.net is a good example of SignalR. WebAPI solves service endpoints or apis. It negoticates content and responds with the appropriate content types. MVC and WebAPI are similar. SignalR isn't in the same pool of technologies. – Phill Dec 18 '13 at 07:16
  • I wish I can mark your comment as answer. That is what I was looking for. Because that link made me to think in that direction. – Vikram Dec 18 '13 at 13:03

2 Answers2

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You should spend some time reading up on the two. They are scoped to handle different problem sets.

SignalR is a framework to allow the server to push to the client.

ASP.NET Web API is focused on RESTful web services.

Also note, they are not mutually exclusive. Here is another SO answer that references how to use them together.

Community
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Aaron Palmer
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You should probably specify a use case to limit and improve the quality of suggestions.

I've been using ServiceStack lately and it works pretty well for web services as you can hook into the request pipeline and only do authentication/authorization as required. One (big) benefit of using ServiceStack is the mex/wsdl publishing for proxy generation as well as multiple format and agent-driven content negotiation support (xml, json, jsv, SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2) and extensibility/plugin infrastructure (CORS, Protobuf, MsgPack support).

Alternatively you could use ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API, WCF, Nancy or write a custom Owin application (given you are comfortable coding up all the bits you need).

Shelakel
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