Answering mail #5

Harvinder Singh wrote:

Hi Adriaan,

I have one doubt on Restful service. What is the defintion of Restful service?

When can I call my service a Restful service? Any web application which is not using SOAP seems to me as an Rest service.

Regards

Harvinder

Hello Harvinder,

Unfortunately that is what a lot of people think. Personally, I call most of such non-SOAP services by the name XML over HTTP.

Just a very few of those services are actually RESTful. Most important properties of these services are the fact that they are stateless (meaning no session ids or long living connections) and they use descriptive URLs to describe resources - which can be manipulated with just a very few simple actions.

They don't necessarily use XML, but that is the format of my preference.

I hope you can recognize the beauty of REST compared to XML over HTTP.

Kind regards,

Adriaan.