Introduction

What is REST?

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. It was designed in a PhD dissertation and has gained some popularity as the new web-service standard. Many developers have praised it as a much better standard than SOAP (which we will not describe here).

At the most basic level, each CRUD operation is mapped to an HTTP method in REST:

• Create: POST
• Read: GET
• Update: PATCH
• Delete: DELETE

The transport mechanism is assumed to be HTTP, but the message contents can be of any type, usually XML or JSON.

The JSR community has designed the JAX-RS API for building RESTful Java web services, while Groovy and Scala both have some built-in support for XML and JSON and various ways of building web services.