HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO (Representational State Transfer)

Today, along with the task of researching GET requests and POST requests, we familiarized ourselves with the concept of REST, or Representational State Transfer. That's a mouthful, isn't it? Ironically, the purpose of REST is to (more or less) make things a whole lot easier in many ways. How? REST is "a programming architectural ideology intended to increase the efficiency of computing systems [which] embodies the idea that the best way to share large amounts of data between multiple parties is to make that data available on-demand by sharing references to that data rather than a complete copy of the data itself."

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This can be a little difficult to picture for someone who hasn't spent some time actively trying to understand it, so I will provide an analogy (based on food of course, because who doesn't like food) which will hopefully clarify things a bit, and maybe also make you want to eat.

So imagine you're in a busy restaurant, like a popular diner. Diners tend to serve many different options. Now imagine if every time any person in the diner wanted something to eat, the chef/cook had to prepare every option available just so the person could see every item and then choose only the specific thing(s) he/she wanted. This would be incredibly inefficient and the whole procedure would be a headache for everyone involved. This is where menus come in handy. The menu is a representation of everything that is available at the diner. Instead of the cook/chef having to make and bring out every item available for consumption at the diner, the customer can just be given a menu which gives each item on the list a name(an identifier of sorts), and provides a method for the customer to refer to any particular item or items and order it.

This is precisely what REST allows. Instead of having all the items/data available to begin with and then choosing what is wanted, REST provides references that represent each item/piece of data which can be requested individually instead of simultaneously getting a bunch of other things that are uncessary.

In a way, with REST we can have our cake and eat it too (not to mention make it bigger, since REST is more scalable than the SOAP alternative which I will get back to you all about in a different post).