A brief history

A brief history... continued

SOAP 

(Simple Object Access Protocol)

SOAP was designed as an object-access protocol in 1998 by Dave Winer, Don Box, Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein for Microsoft, where Atkinson and Al-Ghosein were working at the time. The SOAP specification is currently maintained by the XML Protocol Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium.

SOAP originally stood for "Simple Object Access Protocol" but this acronym was dropped with version 1.2 of the standard.Version 1.2 became a W3Crecommendation on June 24, 2003.

the WSDL

The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is an XML-based interface description language that is used for describing the functionality offered by a web service. The acronym is also used for any specific WSDL description of a web service (also referred to as a WSDL file), which provides a machine-readable description of how the service can be called, what parameters it expects, and what data structures it returns. It thus serves a purpose that corresponds roughly to that of a method signature in a programming language.

REST

Representational state transfer (REST) is a software architectural style consisting of a coordinated set of architectural constraints applied to components, connectors, and data elements, within a distributed hypermedia system. REST ignores the details of component implementation and protocol syntax in order to focus on the roles of components, the constraints upon their interaction with other components, and their interpretation of significant data elements.

The term representational state transfer was introduced and defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding in his doctoral dissertation at UC Irvine.REST has been applied to describe desired web architecture, to identify existing problems, to compare alternative solutions, and to ensure that protocol extensions would not violate the core constraints that make the web successful. Fielding used REST to design HTTP 1.1 and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). The REST architectural style is also applied to the development of web services as an alternative to other distributed-computing specifications such as SOAP.

REST is just HTTP

(you already know it!)

Let's look at some examples...

RESTfully fancy 

with URL parameters, HTTP methods

GET: http://example.com/resources/item17

{item17} = variable

PUT: http://example.com/resources/item17

DELETE: http://example.com/resources/item17

PUT & DELETE = Idempotent 

(multiple identical requests should have the same effect as a single request)

Think of it like folders!

What does REST return?

State

treats each request as an independent transaction that is unrelated to any previous request so that the communication consists of independent pairs of request and response

Authentication Methods