What is REST?

Question

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What am I not understanding about REST?

What is REST? How does it relate to WCF? I have been asked to look into RESTful implementation of services. Can you please point me to links that would be helpful for beginners.

I am a .NET developer with a decent knowledge of ASP.NET

Answer 1

Whole section of MSDN dedicated to just this.

This blog post by Shiju Varghese also gives a pretty decent beginner overview.

Answer 2

REpresentational State Transfer

It is basically the HTTP protocol, which was originally created to allow representational state transfer, not just transfer of web pages. HTTP is most commonly used to GET content and POST data. But it can also be used to PUT and DELETE data, as well as get HEADer information, etc.

Answer 3

Maybe... this ? (REST on Wikipedia)

Answer 4

Here is a link that I used to get up to speed on REST and WCF

Answer 5

A resource lots of people are reffering to when talking about REST is "How I explained REST to my wife" altough it's some sort of general overview and not related to WCF.

There is also Restful.NET by Jon Flanders which is quite good as far as I know (haven't read it myself :() and it's examples are based on WCF.

With best regards.

Answer 6

I found this article helpful for illustrating the basics:
How to GET a Cup of Coffee (InfoQ)

It gives examples of the HTTP requests and responses, what they look like and how they apply to actual business-centric actions. What does the REST message look like when placing an order? updating an order? Searching for an order? etc.

It is not based on any programming language or API (I don't consider HTTP to be an API).