Rest,web Service, Rest-ful service

Introduced

Representational state Transfer (REST) is an architectural principle that treats a Web service as a resource that can be uniquely identified by its URL. A key feature of RESTful Web Services is the explicit use of HTTP methods to represent calls to different operations.

The basic design principles of REST Use the HTTP protocol approach for typical CRUD operations:

• POST-Create Resource
• GET-Retrieving resources
• put– Updating resources
• Delete-Remove resource

The main advantages of REST services are:

• They are highly reusable across platforms (Java,. NET, PHP, and so on) because they all rely on the basic HTTP protocol.
• They use basic XML, rather than complex SOAP XML, and are very handy to use.

REST-based Web services are increasingly becoming the preferred approach for back-end enterprise service integration. Compared to SOAP-based Web services, its programming model is simple, and the use of native XML rather than soap reduces the complexity of the serialization and deserialization process and eliminates the need for other third-party libraries that function the same.

The Java-based framework currently used to build RESTful services, such as Apache CXF, RESTlet, Jax-ws APIs, and REST support, is available from Spring 3.0 and is complex in terms of development and XML configuration, often requiring long-term learning. In addition, because these frameworks rely on specific versions of JAR files, they are difficult to integrate across application server environments. Also, because of the attempts to support both SOAP and REST services (Apache CXF, Jax-ws), they are often very large and can affect performance.

Therefore, this article recommends exposing business services as Class REST services using a simpler extensible framework. The framework is lightweight and is easy to understand using the standard Front controller (front-end controllers) mode. It is also extensible and can integrate back-end services through APIs or any other integrated mode, such as an ESB. You can easily configure the data exchange model by using a custom XML serializer, JAXB, or any other object-to-XML conversion tool.

Original Digest from: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cn/webservices/ws-RESTservices/index.html

Rest,web Service, Rest-ful service