Modern web development demands interaction with servers without any hassle. What this means is that with the evolution of different UI and backend frameworks, developers need to find a way of sharing data with any available framework without any dependencies. This means there should be a way of sharing data from the server with clients, irrespective of their language and framework. To bring a uniformity to sharing data, the first thing that comes to mind is .xml and .json. These formats are supported by every framework.

In this chapter, we will look at an architectural style by which we can get or send data from any program written in any language using any framework. With REST, the architecture we will be discussing, we can bring in methods that can be easily consumed by clients for data operations.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• RESTful services
• Why should we use RESTful services? The difference between RESTful and RESTless services
• Client-server architecture
• ASP.NET Core and RESTful services