# About REST Web Services

Representational State Transfer (REST or RESTful) describes any simple interface that transmits data over a standardized interface (such as HTTP) without an additional messaging layer, such as SOAP. REST provides a set of design rules for creating stateless services that are viewed as resources, or sources of specific information, and can be identified by their unique URIs. A client accesses the resource using the URI, a standardized fixed set of methods, and a representation of the resource is returned. The client is said to transfer state with each new resource representation.

When using the HTTP protocol to access RESTful resources, the resource identifier is the URL of the resource and the standard operation to be performed on that resource is one of the HTTP methods: GET, PUT, DELETE, POST, or HEAD.

Note: The REST web service as a light weight HTTP Server, used for running simple REST compliant POJO's. It is not a fully compliant J2EE server. For complex JAXB, JPA, EJB implementations please defer to the project target J2EE runtime container.

JAX-RS is a Java programming language API that uses annotations to simplify the development of RESTful Web services. JAX-RS annotations are runtime annotations. When you deploy the Java EE application archive containing JAX-RS resource classes to WebLogic Server, the runtime configures the resources, generates the helper classes and artifacts, and exposes the resource to clients.

For complete details about developing RESTful web services and clients using JAX-RS, see the following Oracle documentation:

- Developing and Securing RESTful Web Services for Oracle WebLogic Server

- Jersey: RESTful Web services made easy, at `https://wikis.oracle.com/display/Jersey/Main`