03 March 2025

Use REST Services

REST is an acronym of Representational State Transfer, and is the practise of building services using the semantics of the web.

A REST service request can be defined using four parameters:

  • A URL which identifies the resource (for example: the learner or course)
  • A verb which identifies the operation
  • A message body which contains information about the operation being performed
  • A collection of headers which contain miscellaneous data that the service may require

A REST service response can be defined using three parameters:

  • A status code summarising the outcome of the request (for example: an error of 404 for not found)
  • A body containing detail of the service response (that is: the data requested)
  • A collection of headers which contain miscellaneous information about the response