Important concepts

Before getting into coding, we need to be conversant with some important concepts. This section is aimed at introducing you to some of these concepts in detail.

 

REST

Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style presented by Roy Fielding in the year 2000 for developing web services. It is built on top of the well-known Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and can transfer data in multiple formats, the most common being JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML). The status of a request in REST is indicated using standard HTTP status code (200: OK, 404: Page not found!, and so on). Being based on HTTP, security is taken care of using the already familiar Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS).

While writing such web services, you are free to use any programming language (Java, .NET, and so on) that is capable of making web requests based on HTTP (which is a de facto standard that every language supports)...