REST Article

Introduction

Representational State Transfer (REST), is a software architectural style that defines a set of constraints to be used for creating web services. Web services that conform to the REST architectural style, termed RESTful web sevices, provide interoperability between computer systems on the internet. RESTful web services allow the requested systems to access and manipulate textual representations of web resources by using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations. Other kinds of web services, such as SOAP web servicesm expose their own arbitrary sets of operations.

REST was defined as early as 2000 in Roy Fielding's PhD dissertation "Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures" at UC Irvine. He developed the REST architectural style in parrallel with HTTP 1.1 of 1996-1999, based on the existing design of HTTP 1.0 of 1996.

Features

REST can be applied to Web Service APIs, such as using base URIs, media types and standard HTTP methods (eg GET, PUT, POST, PATCH, HEAD and DELETE)

REST has architectural constraints which affect architectural properties such as: performance in component interactions (which can be used in measurin network efficiency for the user's end), scalability - which allows the support of large numbers of components and interactions among components, simplicity of a uniform interface, modifiability of components to meet changing needs (even while the application is running), visibility of communication between components by service agents...

There are six constraints that defined a RESTful system. These constrains are: Client-server architecture, Statelessness, Cacheability, Layered System, Code on Demand, Uniform Interface. These constraints restrict the ways that the server can process and respond to client requests so that, by operating within these constraints, the system gans desireable non-functional proprties. If the system does not meet all the requirements of these constraints, then it cannot be considered RESTful.

Pros/Cons

REST has its pros and cons:

Pros	Cons
RESTful services (in web applications) perform well and scale well due to the request following simple HTTP protocols. This gives it an advantage over SOAP, REST just has the HTTP processing overhead compared to SOAP's SAX/XML parsing which is slower.	SOAP is more complex and can take on a greater load, but is slower.
REST is less complex in terms of parts being used while requesting in terms of HTTP, this makes it more reliable.	SOAP is better for the good programmers if the IDE or framework they are using provides good support for it.
REST and SOAP are similar in terms of security. (using both HTTP)

Extra Programs / Languages

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) - An alternative to RESTful services.
GraphQL (open source data query and manipulation language for APIs) - Alternative to RESTful services.
JSON (useful in rest for structuring data)
XML (another way to structure data)
HTTP Requests (e.g. GET, POST, PUT, ...)
Data manipulaton

Summary

In conclusion:

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a useful way to build web pages (and services) in a certain architectural style. It is used in many Web API's and Services which is, in turn, used in many websites. SOAP, a competiting process, is for more advanced practices and creates more directed results depending on the performance of the IDE's and the programmer's knowledge. Both processes are useful in creating standardised web applications for dynamic and interactive web pages.