Restful Web Service

Learn the principles of restful web services and what maturity level a service belongs to based on the Richardson Maturity Model.

What is REST

Rest Stands for Representational State Transfer

As part of his doctoral work, Roy Fielding generalized the web’s architectural principles and presented them as a framework of constraints, or an architectural style.

Fielding referred to this architectural style as Representational State Transfer or REST.

In simple terms, REST is nothing but an architectural style around the web. It encourages us to use the web with some constraints and guiding principles. Let’s look at the key principles around the HTTP and URI standards. Abiding by these rules and constraints will make our HTTP application a RESTful-service-enabled application:

  • Everything is a resource.
  • Each resource is identified by a unique identifier (URI).
  • Use Standard HTTP Method.
  • Resources can have multiple representations.
  • Be stateless.

Let’s understand each principle one by one.

RESTful principle

Principle 1: Everything is a resource

Everything on the web should be treated as a resource.

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