What are all the available alternatives to WCF?

Question

I would like to use a technology that is used for communication between services and several thousands of clients. I came to know of WCF and read a little about it. While it looks attractive and has no interoperability issues, i would like to know about other leading technologies which can give me the same features as WCF ? Are there any open source technologies out there ? Also, which is the most widely used technology? I just want this information before i commit myself to WCF.

EDIT: By alternative to WCF, i mean to say that i am looking for a framework that will help me to implement a webservice in linux or any other platform. For example, the wcf simplifies the process of creating a webservice by the use of hard coded .NET applications. Similarly, i need a tool in linux. I came across mono,but found out that it is not complete and not very reliable.

Kirtle

possible duplicate of Open Source Alternatives to WCF – Impostor

As long as you are on a platform that supports the full .NET framework, there is no equal to WCF. If you need something robust and reliable on a *nix platform then you might want look at Java equivalents to WCF. – Incompetence

@casperOne: Thanks. I looked into some of the java equivalents, but none of them seem to be convincing. I guess i will have to go with mono. – Kirtle

Answer 1

I don't think there is any .net framework with comparable features. But the core protocols of WCF such as WSDL/SOAP are not Microsoft specific so it's not as if you're tying yourself into a particular protocol, you're just choosing an implementation.

To put it another way if you choose to migrate away from .net in the future then I would say the WCF migration would be one of the easiest parts. But if you stay with .net WCF is almost certainly going to be the best implementation available given the investment Microsoft has in it (Azure is built on WCF for example).

Exactitude

Thx for the reply. I am not specifically looking to use only .NET. My requirement is to have a service and several clients accessing it. So, if there is any alternative outside .NET, pls mention – Kirtle

Well I'm sure there are plenty of implementations of SOAP web services across all platforms. On Java for example there is JAX-WS (jax-ws.java.net) and plenty of functionality in J2EE. But I wouldn't build an entire application on a technology stack just because I like the web service implementation - it's pretty standard technology. Choose the best platform to support what the application actually does and then just choose the appropriate reference implementation of WSDL etc. – Exactitude

One other point - you say 'same features as WCF' - there are a lot of other features (support for Windows MSMQ, named-pipes on windows etc) that are WCF specific and Microsoft proprietary. But I assume from the question you aren't talking about using these. – Exactitude

Answer 2

I also provide an Open Source WCF alternative in ServiceStack A modern, code-first, DTO-driven, WCF replacement web services framework encouraging code and remote best-practices for creating DRY, high-perfomance, scalable REST web services.

There's no XML config, or code-gen and your one clean C# web service is enabled all JSON, XML, SOAP, JSV, CSV, HTML endpoints are enabled out-of-the-box. It includes generic sync/async service clients providing a fast, typed, client/server communication gateway end-to-end.

Sagacity