Clients overview
As ServiceStack is just a pure HTTP web service it can be accessed with any HTTP-capable client.
Although in addition to this the ServiceStack.Common library and NuGet package also include multiple service clients which are optimized for ServiceStack in aspects like exception handling etc.
There are multiple C# service clients included, each optimized for their respective formats:
- JSON Client
- XML Client
- JSV Client
- SOAP 1.1/1.2 Clients
- ProtoBuf Client available in the ServiceStack.Plugins.ProtoBuf NuGet package.
All clients share the same IServiceClient and IServiceClientAsync so they're easily swappable at runtime, and is what allows the same Unit test to be re-used as within an Xml, JSON, JSV, SOAP Integration test. The JSON, XML and JSV clients also share IRestClient and IRestClientAsync
A productive option for clients (and the recommended approach by ServiceStack) would be to provide a native client library for each of the popular languages you wish to support. This is the approach of companies who really, really want to help you use their services like Amazon, Facebook and Windows Azure. This is an especially good idea if you want to support static languages (i.e. C# and Java) where having typed client libraries saves end-users from reverse engineering the types and API calls. It also saves them having to look up documentation since a lot of it can be inferred from the type info. ServiceStack's and Amazons convention of having ServiceName and ServiceNameResponse for each service also saves users from continually checking documentation to work out what the response of each service will be.
In terms of packaging your client libraries, sticking a link to a zip file on your Websites APIs documentation page would be the easiest approach. If the zip file was a link to a master archive of a Github repository, that would be better as you'll be able to accept bug fixes and usability tips from the community. Finally we believe the best way to make your client libraries available would be to host them in the target languages native package manager - letting end-users issue 1-command to automatically add it to their project, and another to easily update it when your service has changed.
For .NET this means adding it to NuGet, and if you use ServiceStack your package would just need to contain your types with a reference to ServiceStack.Common. One of the benefits of using ServiceStack is that all your types are already created since it's what you used to define your web services with!