Representational State Transfer (REST) Web services, or “RESTful” Web services describes any simple interface that transmits data over a standardized interface (such as HTTP) without an additional messaging layer, such as SOAP.
There is no client context being stored server side (no Sessions). REST is a stateless.
REST is easier to build and consume than using SOAP-services.
REST provides a set of design rules for creating stateless services that are viewed as resources, or sources of specific information, and can be identified by their unique URIs. A client accesses the resource using the URI, a standardized fixed set of methods, and a representation of the resource is returned. The client is said to transfer state with each new resource representation.
Rest is often the base technology behind micro-services
Objects in a typical REST system are addressable by URI and interacted with using verbs in the HTTP protocol.
Because of multiple round-trips and over-fetching, applications built in the REST style inevitably end up building ad hoc endpoints.
Many applications have no formalized client-server contract. Product developers access server capabilities through ad hoc endpoints and write custom code to fetch the data they need. (They end up with a custom endpoint per view).
REST makes use of the HTTP request methods:
When you see an application making PUT or GET requests over HTTP or HTTPS, that’s REST.
A RESTful interface does not store any information about a particular user's session.
Every request authentication is basic. See Http - Authorization Header (authentication entries)
version can be specified:
There is actually two schema file format that may defines your Rest API:
In a contract first / contract-driven development:
Disadvantage:
In a code first development:
Documentation generator:
see Java - Rest
Server:
dispatcher:
Client:
Test:
Via the setting of a proxy, you can set up what's called a mock-server
Test in container. See test-suite with Blog