Question

Explain what is meant by a “resource.” How do RESTful services address resources and operate on them?

Answer 1

Resource :

REST architecture treats every content as a resource. These resources can be Text Files, Html Pages, Images, Videos or Dynamic Business Data. REST Server simply provides access to resources and REST client accesses and modifies the resources. Here each resource is identified by URIs/ Global IDs. REST uses various representations to represent a resource where Text, JSON, XML. The most popular representations of resources are XML and JSON.

A RESTful service uses a directory hierarchy like human readable URIs to address its resources. The job of a URI is to identify a resource or a collection of resources. The actual operation is determined by an HTTP verb. The URI should not say anything about the operation or action. This enables us to call the same URI with different HTTP verbs to perform different operations.