Summary

This lesson introduced the concept of web services and the principles underlying the REST protocol.

REST requires that all resources be made accessible via unique URLs and that all required actions can be carried out on those resources by means of the standard HTTP methods. This makes RESTful web services interface comfortably with Ajax applications, due to the XMLHTTPRequest object having methods that directly reference URLs and HTTP methods to create server requests.

Lesson 16 discusses a different style of web service using SOAP and how it relates to Ajax development.