Can I use TCP in a RESTful service?

Question

REST is using current features of the Web and applying some principles on it to make it more efficient. It uses standard HTTP verbs for communication and take help of its st

Answer 1

REST is an architectural style (or set of constraints). It just so happens that HTTP can match all of those constraints easily. And on top of that a lot of HTTP/1.1 infrastructure out there is already supporting it: servers, proxies, caches, client libraries, parsers, etc. Something like this:

Can systems be built from scratch be to RESTful and not rely on HTTP? Sure. Coming from the authoritative source on the topic Roy Fielding himself:

A REST API should not be dependent on any single communication protocol.

If you read the article or in fact Roy's dissertation you would realize that if you try to follow all of the constraints you would end up with something that looks and behaves pretty much like the modern HTTP though it would probably lack most of the infrastructure support that HTTP has. Hence the question: Is it worth it?

Also if you take a look at the majority of the RESTful services out there they are very rarely fully REST services. This is why they call themselves "RESTful services", and not "REST services". BTW This site's API comes very close to a full REST implementation.