REST Basics

REST is Representational state transfer

REST is light weight protocol.

Using SOAP we can get only XML. Using REST You can send and receive data as JSON, XML

REST is nothing but an URL. Just type the URL on the browser, you can get the related information based how you structured the URL

REST uses GET, POST and PUT methods to send and receive data.

Let's say there is a website called somewebsite.com. Users who are access the web site can see a variety of infromation by visiting website and clicking on the some of the links. somewebsite.com wants to provide services to other Web applications by exposing its information through REST.

So, instead of visiting website and retrieve information, you can directly get information using a URL invocation in your web application.

For example, http://www.somewebsite.com/products/item?id=100 returns an information about particular item id = 100

Ex: Twitter provides a REST API