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Representational State Transfer (REST) has gained widespread acceptance across the Web as a simpler alternative to SOAP- and Web Services Description Language (WSDL)-based Web services. Key evidence of this shift in interface design is the adoption of REST by mainstream Web 2.0 service providers—including Yahoo, Google, and Facebook—who have deprecated or passed on SOAP and WSDL-based interfaces in favour of an easier-to-use, resource-oriented model to expose their services. Basics Fundamental REST didn't attract this much attention when it was first introduced in 2000 by Roy Fielding at the University of California, Irvine, in his academic dissertation, "Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures," which analyzes a set of software architecture principles that use the Web as a platform for distributed computing. When it's attracting this much attention, a concrete implementation of a REST Web service follows four basic design p