What are the options for a REST API for .Net 3.5 stack

Question

I am currently on the .Net 3.5 stack (including VS2008 tooling) and will not be upgrading anytime soon. What options are available to me in order to create a restful API that will be consumed by my own web application. I see my options as:

• MVC2 (less of a choice as the team is not comfortable with it)
• WCF with HTTP toolkit. (not sure what version I should be looking at for my stack)

I need the following features:

• Authentication via cookies (I quite like the ActionFilter approach of MVC for this)
• Authorization on a resource basis (User, account, etc. Again, I like the AF approach to this)
• Everything runs under HTTPS

My uncertainty is what versions, etc do I look at for my stack and what are the arguments for and against each?

Answer 1

Also look at Mindtouch Dream: is a very mature Rest server and client library. Some points

• It has a very good support for async services
• can work with .net 3.5 or mono.
• the last version can also be integrated with Asp Mvc (optional, its completety independent from asp).
• its on github

(I'm not sure about if it will meet your Authentication / Authorization needs)

Answer 2

There are a few options:

• WCF
• ASP.NET MVC
• A HTTP handler (pretty low level though as you have to do all restful stuff yourself)
• OpenRasta
• WCF Web API (.NET 4.0 only afaik)
• WCF Data Services (If you are basically exposing a database as a REST service)

A few more I have found on the web but know nothing about:

• Snooze
• Siesta (Builds on top of ASP.NET MVC)
• Bistro

You can use MVC directly but keep in mind that is is not designed as a REST framework so doesn't thinks like content negotiation for you. You would have to build that yourself. Depending on what you are trying to do that might be a lot of work or it might be quite simple.