User:Felipec/Representational State Transfer

REST (Representational State Transfer) is a term coined by Roy Fielding in his Ph.D. dissertation Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures to describe an architecture style of networked systems.

REST is an architectural style that basically exploits the existing technology and protocols of the Web, including HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and XML. REST is simpler to use than the well-known SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) approach, which requires writing or using a provided server program (to serve data) and a client program (to request data).

REST is a quickly emerging style for interacting with web-services mainly because its simplicity; instead of requiring a whole new set of technologies, it builds directly on what we have today and what we are familiar with, except it applies it in a novel and practical way.

Simplified Example

Resources are accessed through Uniform Resource Identifier's by using HTTP methods. In the following example we will try the get method, of the posts resource, we specify that we want the result in XML and we send the tag parameter with the value of funny.

GET https://bookmarks.com/posts/get.xml?tag=funny

Result:

<posts tag="funny">
  <post href="http://www.youtube.com" description="YouTube" tags="video funny"/>
  <post href="http://www.dilbert.com" description="Dilbert" tags="comics funny"/>
</posts>

Real example:

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/artist/Metallica/toptracks.xml

References

• Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures
• REST for the Rest of Us
• What is REST? a definition from whatis.com

External Links

• Building Web Services the REST Way
• REST: Paul James