REST Services

Last modified: August 20, 2024

Introduction

Representational state transfer (REST) is an approach to consuming or exposing resources. It has gained popularity because of its simplicity, because no extensive schemas or contracts are needed to transfer data between endpoints. It uses the following:

  • HTTP URLs to locate resources
  • HTTP headers to authenticate and specify content types (such as XML or JSON)
  • HTTP methods to identify operations on resources, such as GET (retrieve data) or POST (send data)

To publish REST services, see:

To consume REST services, see: