Chapter 21. RESTful services with the ASP.NET Web API
This chapter covers
Representational State Transfer, or REST, means several things; in this case, it refers to the approach of making services accessible through a set of simple URIs and HTTP verbs. Before the days of web services and stateful web applications, almost everything on the web was RESTful, meaning that all traffic over HTTP used one of the HTTP verbs to define its purpose, and calls were complete without requiring server-side state. Over the years, the use of these verbs dwindled down to nearly all traffic using only the GET and POST verbs for requesting a page and submitting form data, respectively. Over the past few years there’s been a trend toward moving from complex web services to a much simpler framework.