In short
Yes .
HTTP is not just for serving up web pages. It is also a powerful platform for building APIs that expose services and data. HTTP is simple, flexible, and ubiquitous. Almost any platform that you can think of has an HTTP library, so HTTP services can reach a broad range of clients, including browsers, mobile devices, and traditional desktop applications.
Apart from serving the request/response operations of Web Pages, Http protocol is also a powerful platform for building APIs that expose services and data.
WebAPI is a subset of Application Programming Interface which is use as a data exchange pattern in which the data can be receive/transfer in the form of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) or Extensible Markup Language (XML).By the use of WebAPI, the Http Services can reach to any kind of client platform including browsers,mobile devices as well as desktop applications.
It's another purpose is to make REST(Representational State Transfer) services so that the client application can access the resources at the specified URI by using the GET,PUT,POST,DELETE requests.
WCF tried to solve this problem by using the webHttpBinding but it was not fully operational. MS resolved this problem by ASP.NET Web API which is a framework for building REST API's on top of the .NET Framework.
You can read this article
http://code.tutsplus.com/articles/the-increasing-importance-of-apis-in-web-development--net-22368 for why it is important and importance of to learn WebAPI.
Moreover, as a starting guide you can follow these tutorials of mine about how to create and use them
http://www.dotnetfunda.com/articles/show/2340/crud-operation-using-web-api-and-mvc4
http://www.dotnetfunda.com/articles/show/2341/crud-operation-using-web-api-and-windows-application
Also for more details and advance usage of WebAPI, you can go through
http://www.asp.net/web-api
Hope this will be helpful
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Thanks & Regards,
RNA Team
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