The DELETE method is used to delete the resource. In this example, we will delete a resource by making use of the same URI that we used in the other three cases.

Assume that we want to delete the Sales department from the data storage. We send a DELETE request to our service with the following URI: http://www.packtpub.com/resources/departments/Sales

The sequence diagram for our DELETE request is shown in the following diagram:

The series of steps for the DELETE request is as follows:

1. A Java client makes a DELETE request to http://www.packtpub.com/resources/departments/Sales.
2. The server receives the request and lets the REST framework handle it. At this point, the server code executes the proper commands to delete the representation of the Sales department.
3. Once completed, a response is sent back.

With this, we have covered all the major actions that can be carried out on resources in a RESTful web service. To keep things simple during our discussion, we did not talk about the actual implementation of the CREATE, READ, UPDATE, and DELETE operations on the resource. In all three examples, we presumed that we have a well-behaved web service that adheres to the RESTful guidelines, and the client and server communicate over HTTP. We use the communication protocol to send action requests, and our resource representations are sent back and forth through unchanging URIs. We will cover more detailed end-to-end examples later in this book.