RESTful Services enable an application to publish Web services that are accessed by other applications to exchange data. For example, you can configure a RESTful Service to return all employee names for a particular department. The data exchange for a RESTful Service follows the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style.
For each Web service you want your application to provide, you must configure a RESTful Service Module. This module is a grouping of common templates, known as resource templates under a common Universal Resource Identifier (URI) prefix. For each method associated with the same resource template prefix that you want to expose through this Web service, you must define a resource handler. For instance, if you want to provide a method to return data and another to store data, you must define a resource handler for each operation.
When you create a RESTful Service, you supply the necessary information about the structure of the request, response and operation to be performed including:
A URI Template identifying the set of resources the service provides
One or more HTTP methods that the service supports along with the SQL query or PL/SQL block to be performed. There are four HTTP methods including GET, DELETE, POST and PUT. Only one handler per HTTP method is permitted. For example, the empinfo resource handler can only have one resource handler using GET, and only one using PUT.
HTTP Header values that should be bound to parameters of the query block
Parameters expected by the Web service
Type of input expected by the Web service
The format of the response
For an example RESTful Service Module, see "About the Example RESTful Service Module (oracle.example.hr)"
This section describes how to configure RESTful Services. If you want your application to use a Web service, you must configure RESTful Web References. See Implementing Web Services in Oracle Application Express Application Builder User's Guide.