asp.net web api history and how does it work?

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/zxue/2012/11/07/what-is-asp-net-web-api-and-how-does-it-work/

https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/341414/WCF-or-ASP-NET-Web-APIs-My-two-cents-on-the-subjec   这个是重点

A couple of weeks ago (around Feb. 16), the WCF WebAPIs - a framework for building RESTful/Hypermedia/HTTP services, which was in development over the past 1.5 years as a side-project on CodePlex, has been formally integrated into ASP.NET and its name changed to the ASP.NET Web API.

These past two weeks, there have been a lot of questions among WCF developers: What does it mean that the Web APIs are no longer a part of WCF – is WCF dead? Has SOAP gone bankrupt? is HTTP the new way to go for interoperability?

To get a better understanding of what happened and what is the way to go, we need to answer a couple of questions:

1. What is the purpose of the WebAPIs?
2. Why do we need REST HTTP services? What’s wrong with SOAP-over-HTTP?
3. Why did the WebAPIs move from WCF to ASP.NET MVC?
4. Is there still use for WCF? When should I choose Web APIs over WCF?