What are RESTful web services? [duplicate]

Answer 1

REST is a client-server architecture which (among other things) leverages the full capacity of the HTTP protocol.

Some relevant points in REST:

• Each URL on the server represents a resource; either a collection resource or an element resource.
  • A collection resource would be available at a URL like http://restful.ex/items/ which would be a representation of a list of items.
  • A element resource would be available at a URL like http://restful.ex/items/2 which would be a representation of a single item, identified by 2.
• Different HTTP methods are used for different CRUD operations:
  • a GET is a read operation
  • a PUT is a write/modify operation
  • a POST is a create/new operation
  • a DELETE is a... ok, that one is kind of self-explanatory.
• State (or rather, client context) is not stored on the server-side; all state is in the representations passed back and forth by the client's requests and the server's responses.

Answer 2

It's basically web services that implement CRUD using the HTTP methods(GET, POST, PUT, DELETE)

Answer 3

You can check out Roy Fielding's (the creator of the REST architectural style) wiki page here and then move on to his PhD dissertation here and finally for a quick example just take a look at the Twitter API.

Answer 4

RESTful webservices use HTTP methods explicitly by mapping the REST operations to HTTP methods:

• Create - POST
• Retrieve - GET
• Update - PUT
• Delete - DELETE

Here is a link to a good summary.

Answer 5

Check description of REST. Web services conforming to this principle are called RESTful.