9.9 REST BASED WEB SERVICES
It has been seen that SOAP is a protocol for exchanging information as part of Web Services. REST (short for Representational State Transfer) is another means for implementing Web Services, however it is not a protocol. It is an architectural style for distributed systems. Being an architectural style, it also implies that REST is not a specification, so it is not as concrete as SOAP. The key advantage of REST is that it leverages the already existing web infrastructure including HTTP. Not surprisingly, this has become the more popular way of connecting applications.
REST is a result of a doctoral thesis by Dr. Roy Fielding. According to him, REST is actually a reverse-engineer of the concept of web. In other words, ...
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