What is the difference between WCF and a Web Services?

Question

I’ve always worked with Web Services, but lately I’ve seen a lot if you talk about WCF, hence my doubt.

What’s the difference between WCF and a Web Services?

Is there some improvement between one and the other or something that is best to use between them?

Answer 1

Web Service is a general concept and WCF is a specific technology of Microsoft (.NET), so just so it is already very different.

Web Services usually use REST as basic mechanism. There are some rules, but it is very liberal as the data can be trafficked. Web service has nothing to do with XML. Can be used in any standard web technology. Web Service is not SOAP, it can work as SOAP.

WCF can communicate in various ways, it is a technology that tries, as far as possible, to abstract the various existing communication mechanisms, and one of them can be a web service. It is an extensive *framework that tries to be a SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). The nice thing about him is that you can change the Binding communication without changing "nothing" in the code.

Some mechanisms are TCP, UDP, Named Pipes, Peer To Peer, MSQM, and of course HTTP, among others, it is even possible to plug new ones. He’s not just an abstraction in communication, he tries to create a pattern of message exchange, like the web service does it too.

WCF was talked about 10 years ago, but not today, it is almost out of use. It is a heavy technology, difficult to learn, use and has problems of design. The idea is good, but it has been terribly implemented and some situations are too specific to take advantage of this abstraction. It has room for its use, but is more limited than was previously thought. It was created in the last days of megalomania in software development where it was believed that computers would evolve indefinitely and abstractions would always be winners. A lot of what you read about him is based on assumptions that weren’t proven or that only made sense 10 years ago.

Web Service is universal, WCF not, needs to have applications prepared for it. In fact the same is true with web services, but because it is a universal standard, it has better interoperability.

Some people like better than Service Stack, but even it can be too heavy and too difficult besides not being so universal.

WCF is essentially abandoned (still supported) and should look for another technology. The suggestion is to use gRPC.