BizTalk Server 2013: REST Support through WCF-WebHttp

Introduction

Microsoft offers REST support in BizTalk Server 2013 through the WCF-WebHttp Adapter. This has been anticipated for a long time by BizTalk developers. A majority of the services in the cloud is REST based. When exposing a public API over the internet to handle CRUD operations on data REST has now generally considered the best option. Twitter, Google, Salesforce, eBay, Amazon all offer REST API's to use their services. This is just an example of the companies that support REST, there are many more. With the increase of mobile devices and light weight rich (Ajax) web applications over the years the adoption of REST grew more and more.

WCF-WebHttp Adapter

The WCF-WebHttp adapter gives you the ability to send messages to RESTful services through the WCF-WebHttp send adapter. With the receive location you can receive messages from a RESTful service. Through the send adapter you can do a GET request. This is widely used service operation when it comes to interacting with a RESTful service. Besides GET, there is DELETE, POST and PUT. With GET and DELETE operations you cannot send any payload. For POST and PUT request, the adapter uses the BizTalk message body part to the HTTP content/payload.

Note: Since BizTalk sends out message bodies with BizTalk Server 2013 beta you will need to remove the message body with a pipeline.

Conclusion

Microsoft BizTalk product group has made a good decision by supporting REST through the new BizTalk release 2013. Most of the services currently in the cloud are based on REST, which lead to more integration solution requiring communication with RESTful services. The integration solution can BizTalk Server as one of its components. Within an enterprise BizTalk Server can be the heart of the messaging infrastructure supporting many protocols. Adding REST support will mean that BizTalk will provide even more value. BizTalk Server 2013 adds support for REST, which will be cheered by developers and enterprises worldwide that use BizTalk.

See Also

Other resources related to the WCF-WebHttp worth to check out are:

• Exploring REST Capabilities of BizTalk Server 2013 (Part 1: Exposing REST Endpoints)
• Exploring REST Capabilities of BizTalk Server 2013 (Part 2: Consuming REST Endpoints)
• REST (WCF-WebHttp) adapter in BizTalk Server 2010 R2** ** and code
• BizTalk and Rest Example from BizTalk Saturday
• BizTalk Server 2013: New Adapters Series: WCF-WebHttp
• BizTalk Server 2013: WCF-WebHttp Adapter Sample
• BizTalk Server 2013 - you can now connect to every REST service out there more easily out-of-the-box
• MSDN Tutorial: Integrating BizTalk Server 2013 with Salesforce (code)
• Using HttpHeaders with WCF-WebHttp Adapter on Biztalk 2013
• R-ESB another way to use ReST in BizTalk 2013
• Calling the Force.com REST API from BizTalk Server 
• BizTalk Server 2013: REST Services
• Exposing a REST GET endpoint using BizTalk Server 2013
• RESTfully GETting JSON Formatted Data with BizTalk 2013
• BizTalk Server: REST Services Error Handling
• BizTalk Server 2013: Consuming a RESTFul Endpoint using WCF-WebHttp
• Using Variable Mapping in a WCF-WebHttp Send Port without using promoted properties

Another important place to find an extensive amount of BizTalk related articles is the TechNet Wiki itself. The best entry point is BizTalk Server Resources on the TechNet Wiki.