4.1 About RESTful Web Services

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. A service is described as RESTful when it conforms to the tenets of REST.

A RESTful service has the following characteristics:

• Data is modeled as a set of resources. Resources are identified by URIs.

• A small, uniform set of operations are used to manipulate resources (for example, GET, POST, PUT, DELETE).

• A resource can have multiple representations (for example, a blog might have an HTML representation and a RSS representation).

• Services are stateless and because it is likely that the client will want to access related resources, these should be identified in the representation returned, typically by providing hypertext links.