Why REST?
To understand why REST is the dominating architectural style for most web services, we will need to understand what was available before the rise of REST and the challenges that made this change so important in the way that distributed services are built.
The pre-REST era
Before REST, the web services landscape was dominated by protocols such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Extensible Markup Language–Remote Procedure Call (XML-RPC). These were powerful but complex standards that allowed for detailed communication between clients and servers. However, they were often seen as cumbersome due to their verbose nature and the strict requirements they imposed on developers.
SOAP, for instance, required developers to write extensive XML documents with specific calls and responses. It was notorious for its complexity and difficulty in debugging. Similarly, XML-RPC, while simpler than SOAP, still involved significant overhead for simple requests and...
