February 2009
Intermediate to advanced
316 pages
9h 28m
English
Content preview from Java Web Services: Up and RunningBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 4. RESTful Web Services
What Is REST?
Roy Fielding (http://roy.gbiv.com) coined the acronym REST in his Ph.D. dissertation. Chapter 5 of his dissertation lays out the guiding principles for what have come to be known as REST-style or RESTful web services. Fielding has an impressive resume. He is, among other things, a principal author of the HTTP specification and a cofounder of the Apache Software Foundation.
REST and SOAP are quite different. SOAP is a messaging protocol, whereas REST is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems; that is, systems in which text, graphics, audio, and other media are stored across a network and interconnected through hyperlinks. The World Wide Web is the obvious example of such a system. As our focus is web services, the World Wide Web is the distributed hypermedia system of interest. In the Web, HTTP is both a transport protocol and a messaging system because HTTP requests and responses are messages. The payloads of HTTP messages can be typed using the MIME type system, and HTTP provides response status codes to inform the requester about whether a request succeeded and, if not, why.
REST stands for REpresentation State Transfer, which requires clarification because the central abstraction in REST—the resource—does not occur in the acronym. A resource in the RESTful sense is anything that has an URI; that is, an identifier that satisfies formatting requirements. The formatting requirements are what make URIs uniform ...
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