Summary

REST is now all set to be the architectural paradigm of choice for designing and implementing scalable services. It is an architectural paradigm that is based on the stateless HTTP protocol and is used to design applications that can inter-communicate. In REST, resources are used to represent state and functionality and these resources are in turn represented using user-friendly URLs. The RESTful Web Services expose resources through URIs and use the HTTP methods to perform CRUD operations. The REST architectural paradigm not only opens up a lot of possibilities, but also challenges. The OData protocol allows you to query data over the HTTP protocol and then get the results back in Atom, JSON, or XML formats.

Google's Protocol Buffers is a binary serialization format used for data exchanges. Protocol Buffer is fast becoming the technology of choice as a popular serialization format in REST-based WCF services as it is a way of encoding structured data in an extensible format...