RESTful Services Terminology

The following are some major terms related to RESTful services.

RESTful service: An HTTP web service that conforms to the tenets of the RESTful architectural style.
Resource module: An organizational unit that is used to group related resource templates.
Resource template: An individual RESTful service that is able to service requests for some set of URIs (Universal Resource Identifiers). The set of URIs is defined by the URI pattern of the Resource Template
URI pattern: A pattern for the resource template. Can be either a route pattern or a URI template, although you are encouraged to use route patterns.
- Route pattern: A pattern that focuses on decomposing the path portion of a URI into its component parts. For example, a pattern of /objects/:object/:id? will match /objects/emp/101 (matches a request for the item in the emp resource with id of 101) and will also match /objects/emp/ (matches a request for the emp resource, because the :id parameter is annotated with the ? modifier, which indicates that the id parameter is optional).
- URI template: A simple grammar that defines the specific patterns of URIs that a given resource template can handle. For example, the pattern employees/{id} will match any URI whose path begins with employees/, such as employees/2560.
Resource handler: Provides the logic required to service a specific HTTP method for a specific resource template. For example, the logic of the GET HTTP method for the preceding resource template might be:
```
select empno, ename, dept from emp where empno = :id
```
HTTP operation: HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol) defines the standard methods that are supported in Oracle REST Data Services for building RESTful services: GET (retrieve the resource contents), POST (store a new resource), PUT (update an existing resource), and DELETE (remove a resource).