What are RESTful web services? [duplicate]

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What exactly is RESTful programming?

What are RESTful web services? What would be an example of it?

What is the difference between the asmx web servi开发者_JS百科ces and the WCF RESTful service?

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REST is a client-server architecture which (among other things) leverages the full capacity of the HTTP protocol.

Some relevant points in REST:

• Each URL on the server represents a resource; either a collection resource or an element resource.
  • A collection resource would be available at a URL like http://restful.ex/items/ which would be a representation of a list of items.
  • A element resource would be available at a URL like http://restful.ex/items/2 which would be a representation of a single item, identified by 2.
• Different HTTP methods are used for different CRUD operations:
  • a GET is a read operation
  • a PUT is a write/modify operation
  • a POST is a create/new operation
  • a DELETE is a... ok, that one is kind of self-explanatory.
• State (or rather, client context) is not stored on the server-side; all state is in the representations passed back and forth by the client's requests and the server's responses.

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You can check out Roy Fielding's (the creator of the REST architectural style) wiki page here and then move on to his PhD dissertation here and finally for a quick example just take a look at the Twitter API.

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It's basically web services that implement CRUD using the HTTP methods(GET, POST, PUT, DELETE)

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RESTful webservices use HTTP methods explicitly by mapping the REST operations to HTTP methods:

• Create - POST
• Retrieve - GET
• Update - PUT
• Delete - DELETE

Here is a link to a good summary.

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Check description of REST. Web services conforming to this principle are called RESTful.