You need REST !
RESTful Web Services are REST architecture based web services. In REST Architecture everything is a resource. RESTful web services are light weight, highly scalable and maintainable and are very commonly used to create APIs for web based applications.
What is REST ?
REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer. REST is web standards based architecture and uses HTTP Protocol for data communication. It revolves around resource where every component is a resource and a resource is accessed by a common interface using HTTP standard methods.
In REST architecture, a REST Server simply provides access to resources and REST client accesses and presents the resources. Here each resource is identified by URIs/ global IDs. REST uses various representations to represent a resource like text, JSON and XML. Now a days JSON is the most popular format being used in web services. In our Coupley project we have used JSON.
HTTP Methods
Following well known HTTP methods are commonly used in REST based architecture.
- GET — Provides a read only access to a resource.
- PUT — Used to create a new resource.
- DELETE — Used to remove a resource.
- POST — Used to update a existing resource or create a new resource.
