HTTP, Web Servers, and REST

Before we dive into building a web service, let's cover the basics. HTTP is one of the primary protocols for communicating across the internet, particularly when working in a web browser. This protocol provides a contract for a client (typically a web browser) to communicate with a (web) server. In this example, the browser will construct a request containing a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), which it will use to communicate to the server. The server will interpret the request, using the URI string to determine which resource the client is interested in retrieving/manipulating, then constructing a response containing information indicating that the request has completed, or containing a payload in the form of the response body.

Typically, when building a web service, we want to conform to the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) architecture. This architecture prescribes a set of operations we can choose to perform against a resource, allowing...