Using RESTful-WS in Spring

Nowadays, RESTful-WS is perhaps the most widely used technology for remote access. From remote service invocation via HTTP to supporting an Ajax-style interactive web frontend, RESTful-WS is being adopted intensively.

There are a number of reasons for the popularity of RESTful web services:

• Easy to understand: RESTful web services are designed around the HTTP protocol. The URL, together with the HTTP method, specifies the intention of the request. For example, the URL http://somedomain.com/restful/customer/1 with an HTTP method of GET means that the client wants to retrieve the customer information where the customer ID equals 1.
• Lightweight: RESTful is much more lightweight when compared to SOAP-based web services, which include a large amount of metadata to describe which service the client wants to invoke. For a RESTful request and response, it's simply an HTTP request and response like any other web application.