What is REST?
REpresentational State Transfer
Not a specification or standard. It is a
"cult" of loosely-agreed upon programming principles.
- Clients get everything they need to know for the next step in
the process from the resources sent from the Server.
The Server
does not care about Client state.
- All information is conveyed by representations of resources with
URIs.
- Each message includes enough information for the program(mer)
to know how to parse the message.
- This information is sufficient for the client to make
modifications to the Server resources.
- This information, including API descriptions, should use only
hypertext.
- In practice, these principles, especially the last, are often broken.
The advantages are scalability and generality of interfaces. Much
simpler than WSDL and SOAP.
Are RESTful services "web services"?
©2012
Charles Petrie - permission to reproduce widely with attribution.