Publishing a RESTful web service

REST is a type of web service architecture. In recent years, it has gained a lot of popularity. This is due to the fact that RESTful web services follow a protocol that is relatively simple and easy to implement.

In this recipe we will show how it is possible in Application Express to publish the contents of a report as a RESTful web service.

Getting ready

To follow this recipe, APEX Listener 2.0 (or higher) and APEX 4.2 (or higher) should be used.

First, we have to make sure that RESTful access is allowed to the APEX instance. This has to be set in the APEX Administration Services:

1. Log in to the APEX Administration environment.

2. Click on Manage Instance.

3. Find the link to Security in the section called Instance Settings and click on it.

4. Go to the RESTful Access section.

5. Set Allow RESTful Access to Yes.

   

6. Click on Apply Changes

Furthermore, we'll need a report that we can use as the source for our RESTful web service. For this recipe, we'll assume a simple database application...