What is rest services?

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. This is a protocol for exchanging data over a distributed environment. The main idea behind REST is that we should treat our distributed services as a resource and we should be able to use simple HTTP protocols to perform various operations on that resource.If we talk about database as our resource then we usually talk in terms of CRUD operations and we should be able to perform CRUD operations on database / distributed resource using REST API.

Now question is how we map CRUD operations with REST API. In below example i explain how Rest API is mapped with CRUD operations but before that we need to understand how CRUD operations is mapped with HTML Protocol.

Now the basic CRUD operations are mapped to the HTTP protocols in the following manner:

1. GET: This maps to the Retrieve part of the CRUD operation and it will retrieve data from the remote resource.

2. POST: This maps to the Update part of the CRUD operation and it will update the current representation of the data on the remote server.

3. PUT: This maps to the Create part of the CRUD operation and it will create new entry for the current data that is being sent to the server.

4.DELETE: This maps to the Delete part of the CRUD operation and it will delete the specified data from the remote server.

Now how REST APIworks with CRUD operation below is the URL example for REST API to retrieve list of employee records.

http://bayt.com/Employee/

above link will get the list of employee

http://bayt.com/Employee/1

above link will get Employee having ID 1

Lot of more complicated queries can be performed using URL structures.

REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is an architectural style, and an approach to communications that is often used in the development of Web services. The use of REST is often preferred over the more heavyweight SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) style because REST does not leverage as much bandwidth, which makes it a better fit for use over the Internet. The SOAP approach requires writing or using a provided server program (to serve data) and a client program (to request data).

Representational state transfer(REST) is an abstraction of architecture of world wide web. REST is an architectural style to design networked application.REST makes communication between remote computers easy by using the simple HTTP protocol which support for CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations on the server

Not going with commonly available answers from Web. I will describe REST as an API servcie having less overheads as compared to soap API. and aalso it is faster. In the modern days of multiple devices it becomes easy for services to be called irrespective of what device and its compatibility.

Representational state transfer(REST) is an architecture of world wide web. REST makes communication easy by using the simple HTTP protocol which support for CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations on the server

REST is a service based api which allows you to perform Operations such as - GET, PUT, POST, DELETE through a proper URI, so rest api written in a server is used to expose data to other servers, helps other servers to do some of the mentioned operations. On the other hand we can use apis which are written in other servers through callouts.

Although all answers below are correct, I would like to tell you the rest in a practical way.

Rest draws a line between Frontend(/browsers/client) ans Backend(Servers). Though these twos are separate so in-order to work these have to agree on common ground which HTML.

You can also this a rest as an application requires input and return some output.

For more detail click here.

The term "representational state transfer" is refer to evoke an image of how a well-designed Web application work with a network of web pages or a virtual state-machine, where the user work through the application by selecting links, which produce the result, the next page (representing the next state of the application) being transferred to the user and rendered for their use

Representational state transfer(REST) is an abstraction of architecture of world wide web. REST is an architectural style to design networked application.

a Rest are services exposed by a plateform and accessible by a url and paramètres and can be called from any other plateform (front-end or even back-end) .Thank you

REST is the acronym for REpresentational State Transfer. REST is an architectural style for developing applications that can be accessed over the network. REST architectural style was brought in light by Roy Fielding in his doctoral thesis in 2000.

REST is a stateless client-server architecture where web services are resources and can be identified by their URIs. Client applications can use HTTP GET/POST methods to invoke Restful web services. REST doesn’t specify any specific protocol to use, but in almost all cases it’s used over HTTP/HTTPS. When compared to SOAP web services, these are lightweight and doesn’t follow any standard. We can use  JSON, text or any other type of data for request and response.