Which term best describes a web service designed using REST principles and HTTP methods, providing access to resources via standard verbs such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE?

Which term best describes a web service designed using REST principles and HTTP methods, providing access to resources via standard verbs such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE?

• A. REST
• B. RESTful API
• C. Stateless
• D. Cacheable

Answer: (B)

Using REST principles to build a web service means you expose resources via URIs and interact with them using standard HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE to read, create, update, or delete those resources. The term that best describes this kind of service is a RESTful API. REST describes the architectural style and constraints, while a RESTful API is the concrete implementation that follows those rules and provides endpoints you can call with HTTP methods. Why this fits: the emphasis is on how the service is designed and accessed—through resources and standard verbs—so calling it a RESTful API communicates both adherence to REST and the fact that it’s an actual, callable service rather than a theoretical description. Reasoning about the other terms: REST by itself refers to the architectural style, not the specific service implementation. Stateless and Cacheable are constraints within REST that describe how interactions should behave rather than naming the service itself. They are important characteristics, but they don’t denote the type of web service as clearly as RESTful API does.

Using REST principles to build a web service means you expose resources via URIs and interact with them using standard HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE to read, create, update, or delete those resources. The term that best describes this kind of service is a RESTful API. REST describes the architectural style and constraints, while a RESTful API is the concrete implementation that follows those rules and provides endpoints you can call with HTTP methods.

Why this fits: the emphasis is on how the service is designed and accessed—through resources and standard verbs—so calling it a RESTful API communicates both adherence to REST and the fact that it’s an actual, callable service rather than a theoretical description.

Reasoning about the other terms: REST by itself refers to the architectural style, not the specific service implementation. Stateless and Cacheable are constraints within REST that describe how interactions should behave rather than naming the service itself. They are important characteristics, but they don’t denote the type of web service as clearly as RESTful API does.