Getting started

In this section, readers will get an overview of a RESTful API being developed. The requirements, design, and implementation details will be discussed in brief.

REST architecture

Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style that defines a set of good practices, standards, and properties that can be implemented on top of the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). A web service that conforms to REST standards enables easy interoperability between devices on the internet.

RESTful web services enable client devices to produce and consume web resources, which are represented by using text with a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations. Web resources were defined by Tim Berners-Lee to be part of the World Wide Web (WWW) as resources/documents identified by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). The flow of a RESTful web service can be defined as follows:

 

The preceding diagram shows a Client accessing a REST Resource over the internet. The Client initiates the...