I have been catching up with MVC4 Web API and WCF Data Service. From the surface, they both seem to be able to work with oData in the consuming client. I wonder which one is better for separation of concern (separate data service layer from UI layers). In my current solution, I have a plain MVC 3 style Intranet project and a MVC Data Service project. The 1st project has a Service Reference to the 2nd project. My goal is to write the data service once and make it available to all projects that would need to access underline database. When I read about Web API, it seems to me that the ApiControllers can return oData compliant result to the consuming client without MVC Data Service. My confusion is how I am going to expose this Web API MVC project as a service endpoint. Should I wrap it in WCF? Thanks.
You just create a controller inheriting ApiController and decorate one action with [Queryable] attribute, Rest depends on your route setup. Easy-Peasy.
Which one better? Web API. Since it has all the goodness of HTTP and you are not restricted to ATOM format.
You may use PocoHttp for seamless access of the data from your client.