What are RESTful Web Services?

A RESTful web service (also called a RESTful web API) is a web service that is implemented using HTTP and the principles of REST. It is a collection of resources with four defined aspects:

Base URL for the web service, such as:
```
http://example.com/resources
```
Internet media type of the data supported by the web service. This is usually XML, but can be any other valid Internet media type providing that it is a valid hypertext standard.
Set of operations supported by the web service using HTTP methods (for example, GET, PUT, POST, or DELETE).
The API must be hypertext driven.

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