You might have heard about RPC style webservice when people are talking about SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) that seems to be the buzzword of the day.

There is another alternative way of building webservice other than RPC (Remote Protocol Calls) called REST (Representational State Transfer) which is the native way of operation for the web.

The term REST was descrive in Roy Fielding seminal dessertation work which you can find here.'

REST architecture is simply GET and POST operation on a URI of XML document.

As a started, read this wonderful introduction to REST architecture by Ryan Tomayko titled "How I explain REST to my wife".

"Ryan: So anyway, HTTP--this protocol Fielding and his friends created--is all about applying verbs to nouns. For instance, when you go to a web page, the browser does an HTTP GET on the URL you type in and back comes a web page.

Web pages usually have images, right? Those are separate resources. The web page just specifies the URLs to the images and the browser goes and does more HTTP GETs on them until all the resources are obtained and the web page is displayed. But the important thing here is that very different kinds of nouns can be treated the same. Whether the noun is an image, text, video, an mp3, a slideshow, whatever. I can GET all of those things the same way given a URL."


I will continue on this topic on a series of posts this week.