What differentiates a REST web service from a RPC-like one?

Question

I have a web application that uses AJAX to grab JSON data from the server. It requires that the user first log in with their browser so that a cookie can be set. Only the

Answer 1

You are correct about REST being less coupled to the calling object - if you are comparing to a SOAP web service that requires a WSDL file to be called from the server, than yes, REST web services are less coupled (ie require no knowledge of the web service prior to calling it). And most of the time a token needs to be passed along with request for a given 'representation'.

I don't think there is a huge benefit by using REST from ajax, in fact, depending on the API you are dealing with, you may require a token which is passed in as URI parameter (querystring parameter) while using a SOAP based web service, this is not necessary. It is actually quite easy to combine SOAP web services with ajax calls, pass your data in JSON format and deserialize the JSON into an object on the server side. And to top it off, jQuery makes all of this super-easy.