Pro Android Media: Developing Graphics, Music, Video, and Rich Media Apps for Smartphones and Tablets

REST

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. It is a set of architecture principles for design of client-server services. In general, a web service is considered “RESTful,” meaning it follows REST principles, under the following conditions:

• When it uses HTTP methods (GET, POST)
• When it is stateless, meaning that each transaction is independent from other transactions
• When it uses directory-style URLs to pass data rather than query string variables (www.afakeurl.com/shawn/van_every instead of www.afakeurl.com/?firstname=shawn&lastname=van_every)
• When it uses XML (or JSON) for the transfer of data.

A good place to learn more about REST-based web service architecture is an article entitled “RESTful Web Services: The Basics,” by Alex Rodriguez, ...