Page History

Representational State Transfer, from now on called REST, is actually not really a protocol, but merely a style of communication. Great advantages of having no protocol are simplicity, visibility and performance. A disadvantage is that the communication is not strictly defined, and therefore needs to be documented in a sufficient way. There is an attempt to standardize this communication, called Web Application Description Language (WADL), but it is not widely adopted.

Calling a REST service

Calling a REST service is done by URL. This means that all the information that the server needs to process your request is part of the URL (this is not entirely true due to HTTP headers, but close enough). Here is an example of a REST web service that allows you to receive live information on American airports:

...