The REST architectural style was developin parallel with HTTP/1.1, based on the existing design of HTTP/1.0. The World Wide Web represents the largest implementation of a system conforming to the REST architectural style. REST exemplifies how the Web's architecture emerged by characterizing and constraining the macro-interactions of the four components of the Web, namely origin servers, gateways, proxies and clients, without imposing limitations on the individual participants. As such, REST essentially governs the proper behavior of participants.REST-style architectures consist of clients and servers. Clients initiate requests to servers; servers process requests and return appropriate responses. Requests and responses are built around the transfer of representations of resources. A resource can be essentially any coherent and meaningful concept that may be addressed. A representation of a resource is typically a document that captures the current or intended state of a resource.The client begins sending requests when it is ready to make the transition to a new state. While one or more requests are outstanding, the client is considered in transition. The representation of each application state contains links that may be used the next time the client chooses to initiate a new state-transition.REST facilitates the transaction between web servers by allowing loose coupling between different services. REST is less strongly typed than its counterpart, SOAP. The REST language uses nouns and verbs, and has an emphasis on readability. Unlike SOAP, REST does not require XML parsing and does not require a message header to and from a service provider. This ultimately uses less bandwidth. REST error-handling also differs from that used by SOAP.REST is a set of principles that define how Web standards, such as HTTP and URIs, are supposed to be used (which often differs quite a bit from what many people actually do). The promise is that if you adhere to REST principles while designing your application, you will end up with a system that exploits the Web’s architecture to your benefit. In summary, the five key principles are:Give every “thing” an IDLink things togetherUse standard methodsResources with multiple representationsCommunicate statelesslyhttp://www.infoq.com/articles/rest-introduction
Everthing was client.SVC Web Service in SharePoint 2010.You need a proxy to read from client.svc. The proxy will take the code segments that we have and execute the equal server side code. We only had Managed Client,
The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a Web protocol for querying and updating data that provides a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. OData does this by applying and building upon Web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores. The protocol emerged from experiences implementing AtomPub clients and servers in a variety of products over the past several years. OData is being used to expose and access information from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, relational databases, file systems, content management systems and traditional Web sites.OData is consistent with the way the Web works - it makes a deep commitment to URIs for resource identification and commits to an HTTP-based, uniform interface for interacting with those resources (just like the Web). This commitment to core Web principles allows OData to enable a new level of data integration and interoperability across a broad range of clients, servers, services, and tools.http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=ReleaseYear gt 2012&AverageRating gt 4
One of the majorimproviements has been made that that client.svc has been extended to provide direct support for client.svc. Now you can call client.svc using REST calls. Means you can now do stuff to SharePoint from non Microsoft Platform using the HTTP Get, Post request. Client.svc has now been implemented to cover not all but many of the oData specification which you can check from www.odata.org. Please note that not all the methods or calls are supported. You can check these details from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp142385.aspxOn the other side there are great improvements in Server Side API of Client Object Model which gives us access to more information from SharePoint as well as a API that allow access to SharePoint from Windows Phone.