Introductions to REST

Rest architecture style is stateless client server protocol and always it uses HTTP .Rest stands for Representational  State Transfer. In Restful application Rest use HTTP for all curd operations (Create, Read , Update, Delete). So Rest is very lightweight  by comparing other RPC(Remote Producer  Calls) and web services.

Rest API has some advantage like platform independent ,language independent ,run top of HTTP,able to use in the presence of firewalls easily. But there is no inbuilt security features in Rest. But  security features can be added like username/password tokens.

Rest operations  are self contained and each and every request carry all the information to the server  that it need to complete the request. So there is no cookies in good Rest design.

Rest request :-

http://www.mytutorialparadise.com/useraccount/111  -It’ll retrieve the user details of 111^th  user.

http://www.mytutorialparadise.com/useraccount?name=Kamal$nic=12234342  It’ll retrieve the details of person which named Kamal and have nic of 12234342.

The server response in Rest is often an XML file but CSV(Commar seperater value) and JSON (JavaScript Object Notations) formats can use.XML is easy to expand and type safe.CSV is more compact and JSON is  easy to parse.