The REST architectural style

REST, Representational State Transfer, is an architural style that captures (post-hoc) the characteristics of the Web that made it so successful. It is a simpler alternative to SOAP and WSDL-based Web Services, where a representation of the requested resource is returned.

A concrete implementation of a REST web service follows four basic design principles:

• Uses HTTP methods explicitly (POST, GET, PUT, DELETE)
• Stateless
• Exposes directure structure
• Transfer XML, Javascript Object Notation, or both

In the Web Services world, REST is a key design idiom that embraces a stateless client-server architecture in which the web services are viewed as resources and can be identified by their URIs.

The JAX-RS provides full support for building and deploying RESTful web services. It offers a number of utility classes and interfaces, and declarative annotations that allow you to:

• Identify components of the application
• route requests to particular methods/classes
• extract data from requests into arguments of methods
• provide metadata used in responses