RESTful Web services: The basics. The basics REST defines a set of architectural principles by which you can design Web services that focus on a system's resources, including how resource states are addressed and transferred over HTTP by a wide range of clients written in different languages. If measured by the number of Web services that use it, REST has emerged in the last few years alone as a predominant Web service design model. In fact, REST has had such a large impact on the Web that it has mostly displaced SOAP- and WSDL-based interface design because it's a considerably simpler style to use.
REST didn't attract this much attention when it was first introduced in 2000 by Roy Fielding at the University of California, Irvine, in his academic dissertation, "Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures," which analyzes a set of software architecture principles that use the Web as a platform for distributed computing (see Resources for a link to this dissertation). Back to top Listing 1. The Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS) -- Rapidly Build Lightweight Web Services. Representational State Transfer. Representational State Transfer (REST) is a software architecture style consisting of guidelines and best practices for creating scalable web services.[1][2] REST is a coordinated set of constraints applied to the design of components in a distributed hypermedia system that can lead to a more performant and maintainable architecture.[3] REST has gained widespread acceptance across the Web[citation needed] as a simpler alternative to SOAP and WSDL-based Web services.
RESTful systems typically, but not always, communicate over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol with the same HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.) used by web browsers to retrieve web pages and send data to remote servers.[3] The REST architectural style was developed by W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) in parallel with HTTP 1.1, based on the existing design of HTTP 1.0.[4] The World Wide Web represents the largest implementation of a system conforming to the REST architectural style.
Architectural properties[edit] RESTful Web Services. Articles Index In software engineering, the term software architectural style generally refers to "a set of design rules that identify the kinds of components and connectors that may be used to compose a system or subsystem. " * Some common examples of architectural styles include the Pipe and Filter, Layered, Push Based, and so on.
In the web services world, REpresentational State Transfer (REST) is a key design idiom that embraces a stateless client-server architecture in which the web services are viewed as resources and can be identified by their URLs. Web service clients that want to use these resources access a particular representation by transferring application content using a small globally defined set of remote methods that describe the action to be performed on the resource.
The HTTP methods such as GET and POST are the verbs that the developer can use to describe the necessary create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) actions to be performed. When to Use REST Code Sample 1. An Introduction to Building RESTful Web Services in Java Using NetBeans 6.0.