REST Architecture

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.

JSON representation of a resource.

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.

Examples for HTTP methods

REFFERENCES:https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm

http://www.restapitutorial.com/lessons/restquicktips.html