A RESTful web service is a representational state transfer, which is an architectural style. The RESTful resources revolve around the transfer of data in some representational format. The REST resources will be in the form that needs to suit the consumer. It can be in representation forms, such as XML, JSON, or HTML. In RESTful web services, the state of the resource is more important than the action taken against the resource.

Advantages of the RESTful web services are as follows:

• RESTful web services are fast as they consume less resources and bandwidth. It's just HTTP-based, so there is less overhead.
• It can be written and executed on any platform.
• The most important thing is that it allows formats such as HTML, XML, plain text, and JSON.