Question

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what is RESTful/REST

Is ReST a protocol? and is it only for web apps?

Answer 1

REST is less a protocol and more an… idea, if you like. It’s a system of building a web service which follows a certain set of principles, making everything simple and easy to use.

Taking from the stack overflow tag for REST:

Representational state transfer (REST) is a style of software
architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide
Web. It’s more popular nowadays because of RESTful web services which
offers an alternate easier and simpler way for interoperability among
heterogeneous systems.

It revolves around giving everything you’d want to request an ID, and accessing it – rather than calling a service which performs a specific task, you access a specific ID or set of IDs. It means all actions can be standardised using basic HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, etc.

You can access a RESTful web service from anything, not just web apps.

But really, I could be here for quite a while explaining – as it’s been said, the best thing you can do is just give it a Google and spend an hour or so reading. Perhaps this might be handy.