Subject: Advanced Internet Technology

Topic: RIA and Mashup

Difficulty: Low

• Representational State Transfer (REST), or RESTful, web services provide interoperability between computer systems on the Internet. REST-compliant web services allow the requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of web resources by using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations. Other kinds of web services, such as WSDL and SOAP, expose their own arbitrary sets of operations.

• "Web resources" were first defined on the World Wide Web as documents or files identified by their URLs.

• In a RESTful web service, requests made to a resource's URI will elicit a response that may be in XML, HTML, JSON, or some other format.

• The response may confirm that some alteration has been made to the stored resource, and the response may provide hypertext links to other related resources or collections of resources.

• When HTTP is used, as is most common, the operations available are GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and other predefined CRUD HTTP methods.

• By using a stateless protocol and standard operations, REST systems aim for fast performance, reliability, and the ability to grow, by re-using components that can be managed and updated without affecting the system as a whole, even while it is running.