How to let external applications communicate with your database and your site?

I understand the term used all over social networking sites is "API", I did some research on the web, and it seems to be a very big topic to cover.

As per my previous post, I have made a social networking site using asp.net 3.0 and C#. It's a small prototype.

A few tables such that the record of friends and their friends and their interest is kept. There are no privacy constraint at the moment

What I would like is to, "welcome developers please download the API for free and start making application开发者_运维技巧s for the social network". Consider application extracts interests of the friends of a friends who is using the application.

From what I understand, an API is a space to host an application either provided by me or the developer.

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APIs are an interface to (all or some of) the functionalities of your application. In your particular scenario you can expose Web-apis by allowing remote http calls (for example by using web services).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface#Web_APIs

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It's a bit more complicated than just "Right-click add API..." but you have a few options:

WCF, WCF rest, and Data Services / oData

If you're in a desparate hurry to get an API out the quickest way will be to use oData/Data Services, you basically make your database queryable via the web. (You can restrict Read/Write access.)

It's as simple as creating an Entity Framework model for your database, and exposing that as a WCF Data Service and you're done.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/bb931106.aspx

http://www.odata.org/developers/odata-sdk