You may have heard of the terms REST or RESTful when talking to software developers but what does it actually mean?
REST stands for ‘representational state transfer’, it’s a methodology for building software for the web and was first defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding. Technically speaking, it is a way of providing interoperability between computer systems on the Internet.
From a users point of view…
If you have used web based software systems in the past you may have noticed that the pages reload themselves whenever you perform an action, such as when saving. This is because actions are not performed in the background, the page has to be reloaded in order for the action to occur.
With a RESTful solution, the request to save is sent via a HTTP method to a file on the server, the web page then waits for the response to that action and acts accordingly, for example showing a ‘saved’ message. All of this happens seamlessly without a page reload. This therefore makes for a much improved user experience and is significantly quicker.
From a developers point of view…
Here at CBS Solutions LTD we use the RESTful approach for all of our bespoke software solutions as it not only improves the user experience, it’s fast, it’s reliable, it enables us to develop in a modular way and allows a system to grow by adding components without affecting the software system as a whole.
RESTful technologies include: HTTP methods, Asynchronous Javascript (AJAX), XML and JSON.
If you’d like to discuss how we can use the RESTful approach for your next bespoke software project please get in touch.
