Created Saturday 09 November 2013
REST stands for Representational State Transfer. (It is sometimes spelled "ReST".) It relies on a stateless, client-server, cacheable communications protocol -- and in virtually all cases, the HTTP protocol is used.
The idea is that, rather than using complex mechanisms such as CORBA, RPC or SOAP to connect between machines, simple HTTP is used to make calls between machines.
As a rule, GET requests should be for read-only queries; they should not change the state of the server and its data. For creation, updating, and deleting data, use POST requests. (POST can also be used for read-only queries, as noted above, when complex parameters are required.)
In a way, this web page (like most others) can be viewed as offering services via a REST API; you use a GET request to read data, and a POST request to post a comment -- where more and longer parameters are required.
No backlinks to this page. comments powered by Disqus