WEB COMMUNICATION: IMPLEMENTING A RESTFUL WEB API IN C# .NET 8 USING CLEAN ARCHITECTURE

Abstract

Web communication technology forms today a crucial component of web- and cloud-based information processing. One of the key approaches in this area is REST (Fielding, 2000), which today coexists with other technologies, in particular GraphQL and gRPC. In this paper we focus on implementing REST-based web communication components using the latest version of C#/.NET SDK (.NET 8 LTS, released on 14.11.2023). In the first part, we discuss the concept of a RESTful network architecture and summarize the features which allow to define the communication style as RESTful. Next sections focus on C# implementation patterns specific for .NET such as minimal Web API and API controllers. Finally, a standardized approach for web API implementation in .NET based on Clean Architecture is discussed and tested. One of the main conclusions from this work is that the latest version of C#/.NET provides an attractive toolset for development of RESTful communication architectures, as it allows for efficient and well-structured implementation.