There is REST for the Weary Developer

This brief article provides an example of working with theRepresentational State Transfer style of software architecture. REST(Representational State Transfer) is a style of software architecturefor accessing information on the Web. The RESTful service refers toweb services as resources that use XML over the HTTP protocol. Theterm REST dates back to 2000, when Roy Fielding used it in his doctoraldissertation. The W3C recommends using WSDL 2.0 as the language fordefining REST web services. To explain REST, we take an example ofpurchasing items from a catalog application...
First we will define CRUD operations for this service as following. Theterm CRUD stands for basic database operations Create, Read, Update, andDelete. In the example, you can see that creating a new item with Idis not supported. When a request for new item is received, Id is createdand assigned to the new item. Also, we are not supporting the updateand delete operations for the collection of items. Update and delete aresupported for the individual items...
Interface documents: How does the client know what to expect in returnwhen it makes a call for CRUD operations? The answer is the interfacedocument. In this document you can define the CRUD operation mapping,Item.xsd file, and request and response XML. You can have separate XSDfor request and response, or response can have text such as 'success'in return for the methods other than GET...
There are other frameworks available for RESTful Services. Some of themare listed here: Sun reference implementation for JAX-RS code-namedJersey, where Jersey uses a HTTP web server called Grizzly, and theServlet Grizzly Servlet; Ruby on Rails; Restlet; Django; Axis2a.
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