Representational State Transfer (REST) has gained widespread acceptance across the Web as a simpler alternative to SOAP- and Web Services Description Language (WSDL)-based Web services. Key evidence of this shift in interface design is the adoption of REST by mainstream Web 2.0 service providers—including Yahoo, Google, and Facebook—who have deprecated or passed on SOAP and WSDL-based interfaces in favor of an easier-to-use, resource-oriented model to expose their services. In this article, Alex Rodriguez introduces you to the basic principles of REST:
use HTTP methods explicitly, be stateless, expose directory structure-like URIs and transfer XML, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), or both.
Representational State Transfer (REST) has gained widespread acceptance across the Web as a simpler alternative to SOAP- and Web Services Description Language (WSDL)-based Web services. Key evidence of this shift in interface design is the adoption of REST by mainstream Web 2.0 service providers—including Yahoo, Google, and Facebook—who have deprecated or passed on SOAP and WSDL-based interfaces in favor of an easier-to-use, resource-oriented model to expose their services. In this article, Alex Rodriguez introduces you to the basic principles of REST:
use HTTP methods explicitly, be stateless, expose directory structure-like URIs and transfer XML, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), or both.
Web-oriented architecture is getting some traction this year. I take a look at the latest discussions in the industry, plus what we're learning. SOA is not dead, far from it, but we're taking valuable lessons learned from the Web and moving them into the enterprise.