What s the difference between REST RESTful

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What s the difference between a REST system and a system that is RESTful   From a few things I ve read most so called REST services are actually RESTful services  So what is the difference between the two

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As Jason said in the comments  RESTful is just used as an adjective describing something that respects the REST constraints

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Think of REST as an architectural  class  while RESTful is the well known  instance  of that class   Please mind the     we are not dealing with  real  programming objects here

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A service based on REST is called a  RESTful service    Source I rely on posting that  Dr Dobbs Archive

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Web services are essentially web sites whose content is consumed by computer programs  not people   REST is a set of architectural principles that stipulate that web services should maximally leverage HTTP and other web standards  so that programs gain all the good stuff that people already can get out of the web   REST is often contrasted with SOAP web services  and other  remote procedure call  oriented web services   Stefan Tilkov s presentations on REST at Parleys com are quite good  especially this one   For a book  you can t get any better than Richardson and Ruby s Restful Web Services

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A  REST service  and a  RESTful service  are one and the same   A RESTful system is any system that follows the REST conventions as defined in the original document that created the idea of RESTful networked applications   It s worth noting there are varying levels of RESTfulness  Overall  REST is a style  not a standard  so there is room for interpretation based on needs  one example is hierarchical resource URLs  e g   things ID relatedthings  vs flat URLs  e g   things ID and  relatedthings thing ID

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There are 4 levels of API defined in the Richardson Maturity Model  These are defined as     level 0  any system that has a single endpoint for all its apis SOAP or RPC fall in this category   Level 0 apis can also resemble  commands   level 1  a ResourceUri described system  This is a system that  defines multiple entity-based URIs  instead of having a single endpoint like a level 0 systems would   These URIs can use different http actions  POST  GET  PUT  etc  to implement different actions against that resource  level 2  aka level 1 w  a compliant use of Standard HTTP methods verbs and multi status code responses level 3  aka level 2 plus HATEOAS  hypermedia included in the response which describes additional calls you can make    While levels 1  level 2  and level 3 can be considered as REST systems  only the stricter levels  aka level 2  and level 3  are considered to be RESTful   So essentially all RESTful apis are REST apis  but not all REST apis are RESTful  definition of the Richardson Maturity Model

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Representational State Transfer  REST  is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web  The term Representational State Transfer was introduced and defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding1 2  in his doctoral dissertation  Fielding is one of the principal authors of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol  HTTP  specification versions 1 0 and 1 1  Conforming to the REST constraints is referred to as being    RESTful     Source Wikipedia

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Coming at it from the perspective of an object oriented programming mindset  REST is analogous to the interface to be implemented  and a RESTfull service is analogous to the actual implementation of the REST  quot interface quot   REST just defines a set of rules that says what it is to be a REST api  and a RESTfull service follows those rules  Allot of answers above already laid out most of those rules  but I know one of the big things that is required  and in my experience often overlooked  as that a true REST api has to be hyperlink driven  in addition to all of the HTTP PUT  POST  GET  DELETE jazz

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REST is an style of software architecture for distributed software  Conforming to the REST constraints is referred to as being    RESTful      Very used today to build web services as an alternative to SOAP   Here you have some links to check  http   en wikipedia org wiki Representational State Transfer http   www computerworld com s article 297424 Representational State Transfer REST  http   www ibm com developerworks webservices library ws-restful

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REST is an architectural pattern for creating web services  A RESTful service is one that implements that pattern

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REST based Services Architecture vs  RESTFUL Services Architecture To differentiate or compare these 2  you should know what REST is  REST  REpresentational State Transfer  is basically an architectural style of development having some principles   It should be stateless  It should access all the resources from the server using only URI  It does not have inbuilt encryption  It does not have session  It uses one and only one protocol - HTTP  For performing CRUD operations  it should use HTTP verbs such as get  post  put and delete  It should return the result only in the form of JSON or XML  atom  OData etc   lightweight data     REST based services follow some of the above principles and not all RESTFUL services means it follows all the above principles  It is similar to the concept of  Object oriented languages support all the OOP concepts  examples  C    C  Object-based languages support some of the OOP features  examples  JavaScript  VB  Example  ASP Dot NET MVC 4 is REST-Based while Microsoft WEB API is RESTFul  MVC supports only some of the above REST principles whereas WEB API supports all the above REST Principles  MVC only supports the following from the REST API  We can access the resource using URI  It supports the HTTP verb to access the resource from server  It can return the results in the form of JSON  XML  that is the HTTPResponse    However  at the same time in MVC  We can use the session  We can make it stateful  We can return video or image from the controller action method which basically violates the REST principles   That is why MVC is REST-Based whereas WEB API supports all the above principles and is RESTFul

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REST stands for representational state transfer  That means that state itself is not transferred but a mere representation of it is  The most common example is a pure HTML server based app  no javascript   The browser knows nothing about the application itself but through links and resources  the server is able transfer the state of the application to the browser  Where a button would normally change a state variable  e g  page open  in a regular windows application  in the browser you have a link that represents such a state change   The idea is to use hypermedia  And perhaps to create new hypermedia types  Potentially we can expand the browser with javascript AJAX and create new custom hypermedia types  And we would have a true REST application   This is my short version of what REST stands for  the problem is that it is hard to implement  I personally say RESTful  when I want to make reference to the REST principles but I know I am not really implementing the whole concept of REST  We don t really say SOAPful  because you either use SOAP or not  I think most people don t do REST the way it was envisioned by it s creator Roy Fielding  we actually implement RESTful or RESTlike architectures  You can see his dissertation  and you will find the REST acronym but not the word RESTful

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REST  is an architectural paradigm   RESTful  describes using that paradigm

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thanks for the answers  Read this article by Alex Rodriguez which suggests that a RESTful web service has 4 basic characteristics which are    Use HTTP methods explicitly  Be stateless  Expose directory structure-like URIs  Transfer XML  JavaScript Object Notation  JSON   or both

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REST REpresentation State Transfer  is an architecture using which WebServices are created   and   RESTful is way of writing services using the REST architectures  RESTful services exposes the resources to identify the targets to interact with clients

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Representational state transfer  REST  is a style of software architecture  As described in a dissertation by Roy Fielding  REST is an  architectural style  that basically exploits the existing technology and protocols of the Web   RESTful is typically used to refer to web services implementing such an architecture

[architecture] What's the difference between REST & RESTful

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