This chapter is intended to give an overview of RESTful web services. This is essential for an easy understanding of what you will learn in the rest of the book. As we have just started our topic, we have not covered any code samples in this chapter to keep it simple. In the following chapters, we will examine popular Java tools and frameworks available for building a RESTful web service along with many real-life examples and code samples.

In the next chapter, we will discuss the JSON representation of the REST resources and the Java APIs for JSON processing.