The term REST refers to, which is a software architecture style to create scalable web services. REST has gained widespread acceptance across the Web as a simpler alternative to SOAP and WSDL-based web services.
RESTful systems typically communicate over hypertext transfer protocol with the same HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and so on) used by web browsers to retrieve web pages and send data to remote servers.
With the prevalence of web servers, many systems now feature REST APIs and can return plain text or structured information. A typical example of plain text might be a time-of-day service, but structured information is the more common for complex requests as it contains meta information to identify the various fields.
Historically this was returned as XML, which is still common in SOAP web services, but more popular recently is JSON, since this is more compact and ideal for the Web where bandwidth may be limited. As with XML, which we looked at earlier, the JSON...
