REST Web services

REST (representational state transfer) is an approach for getting content from a website by reading a designated webpage that contains an XML (Extensible Markup Language) file that describes and includes the desired content. A basic use case for it would be an online publisher making available syndicated content. Subscribers would need only to know the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) for the page where the XML file was located, read it with a Web browser, interpret the content data, and reformat and use it appropriately. The fundamental difference between REST Web services and document-style Web services is how the service consumer knows what to expect out of the service. Web services have contracts, defined in WSDL. Since Web services focus on the service, rather than on the resource, the consumer has clear visibility into the behavior of the various operations of the service, whereas in RESTful resource-oriented perspective, we have visibility into the resources, but the behavior is implicit, since there is no contract that governs the behavior of each URI-identified resource. Find the latest information about Restful web services in this topic section.