There’s been a good amount of buzz surrounding web services for a some time now.  Built upon the same HTTP protocol we humans use every day when updating our Facebook profiles or Netflix queues, essentially web services involve requests for XML files made programmatically by applications.

Historically, the SOAP protocol has been used to implement the majority of web services.  Since web (HTTP) traffic flows freely through most firewalls on port 80, these services are relatively easy to deploy in terms of networking.  Implementation and maintenance, though?  Not so much.  This is because for each and every SOAP web service, the methods (the ‘verbs’ the service provider offers) have had to have been individually implemented and then fully described to the client machine ahead of time.  In some cases, this level of flexibility is useful and well worth the extra overhead - however, for many (if not most) web services, writing these methods each and every time represents a significant amount of ‘wheel reinventing’ and additional development time.

Luckily, it turns out that often the plumbing already built into the underlying HTTP protocol also contains all the method (verb) functionality needed for many web services as well.

And thus we come to the concept of RESTful web service design.

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