RESTful Java Web Services - Third Edition

The description and discovery of RESTful web services

As you may know, WSDL is used for describing the functionality offered by a SOAP web service. For a SOAP web service, this is a widely accepted standard and is supported by many enterprises today. In contrast, there is no such standard for RESTful web services, and you may find different metadata formats used by various enterprises.

However, in general, you may see the following goals in common among all these metadata formats for RESTful APIs, although they differ in their syntax and semantics:

• Entry points for the service
• Resource paths for accessing each resource
• Allowed HTTP methods to access these resources, such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE
• Additional parameters that need to be ...