Introduction to RESTful web services

RESTful web services are very flexible. RESTful web services can consume several types of different MIME types, although they are typically written to consume and/or produce data in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format.

MIME types

MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions; it is used to indicate the data type that is consumed or produced by RESTful web services.

Web services must support one or more of the following six HTTP methods:

• GET – By convention, a GET request is used to retrieve an existing resource
• POST – By convention, a POST request is used to update an existing resource
• PUT – By convention, a PUT request is used to create or replace a new resource
• DELETE – By convention, a DELETE request is used to delete an existing resource
• HEAD – By convention, a HEAD request returns an HTTP header with no body
• PATCH – By convention, a PATCH request is...