RESTful Web Services, Introduction and Motivation

RESTful web services are being used widely nowadays. RESTful is simple and most widely used among other web services. In fact, its simplicity is a reason for its fame as well. If you are reading this book, then chances are that you know something about RESTful web services. You probably have used it or you have just heard of it. But even if you don't know much about RESTful web services, don't worry as we are first defining it right here. So first, let's list the high level topics that we will be covering in this chapter:

• Web services, what is a web service?
• REST architecture (constraints of REST)
• RESTful web services
• Conventions of RESTful web services
• HTTP verbs (methods)
• Why RESTful web services?
• Response type and response codes
• Case study - RESTful web service endpoints for a blog

However, there are a lot of misconceptions about RESTful web services. For example, some people think that anything over the web returning JSON is a RESTful web service and RESTful web services only return JSON. This is not true.

In fact, RESTful web services support multiple formats and not everything returning JSON is a RESTful web service. To avoid confusion, let us understand what RESTful web service is.

A web service based on the REST architecture is a RESTful web service. So, what exactly is a web service and REST architecture? Let's start by understanding web service first and then the REST architecture.