Recently I have been enjoying the flexible nature of RESTful services. Much like SOAP, REST allows applications to interact with flexible binding. The big difference is that it takes advantage of traditional HTTP verbs to perform CRUD actions (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) we are familiar with when communicating with database services. Also, similar to SOAP, data is communicated in a simple typeless form like XML we have come to know as JSON (Javascript Object Notation).
Ok. These are all facts known to most of us at one level or another. What makes it so interesting to me is the ability of RESTful services to serve so many different kinds of applications. In addition, the concepts of a REST service are straight forward such that they can be created using many different development stacks. You can create and host your own REST service, or build it on top of most web servers such as PHP or IIS.
The point is that RESTful services have overtaken SOAP as a ubiquitous communications protocol between layers in the most part because of the simplicity already built into the HTTP protocol and the flexibility of JSON.
One can write a single RESTful backend service and have it consumed by Objective native applications on apple devices, Java applications on Android devices, Java Script running in browsers, Dot Net applications in windows…pretty much anything that can communicate through HTTP. That’s a pretty broad reach for a system to reach.
Share your thoughts on RESTful services here or by Email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben