Question

How would I model a system that needs to be able to provide content in a format that would be consumable by iphone, Android or web browser (or whatever). All a new consumer would have to do is build a UI with rules on how to handle the data. I’m thinking something RESTful returning JSON or something.

I’m really looking for suggestions on the kinds of things I’d need to learn in order to be able to implement a system on this scale.

As an ASP.NET MVC developer, would that be the best framework/archetectrue to go with?

Thanks

Answer 1

I am working on a project now that has to do this very thing. While searching the net on this I found Aleem Bawany’s article on how it could be done in ASP.Net MVC. I really like the fact that it uses an action filter to handle the response. I modified the code in his article to look at the extension of the request instead of the content type.

For example /products/1.xml would return the xml representation of the
product whose id is 1 from the database.

Also /products/1.json would return the json representation of the product whose id is 1 from the database.

And /products/1 would return the html representation of the product whose id is 1 from the database.

The nice thing about returning data this way is that it lets the consumer decide how they want to consume the data.