HTTP basics
HTTP is a powerful platform for building services. You can use the existing HTTP verbs to build services. For example, you can use the existing HTTP verb GET to get the list of products or POST to update information about the product. Let's take a quick look at how HTTP works with respect to building the services.
There is no difference in the underlying mechanism between serving the HTML pages in ASP.NET MVC and serving the data in the context of HTTP services. Both follow a request-response pattern and the same routing mechanism.
An HTTP request can be sent from any client (desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile, and so on) to the server and the server will respond back with an HTTP response. An HTTP response can be sent to the client in any format such as JSON or XML. This is shown in the following figure:
In the preceding diagram, a request is sent from the desktop computer (it could equally be sent from a mobile or tablet; it makes no difference) and the server sends...
