About RESTful Web Services
Roy Fielding coined the acronym REST, denoting Representational State Transfer, in his
PhD thesis. The Ehcache implementation strictly follows the RESTful resource-oriented architecture style. Specifically:
The HTTP methods GET, HEAD, PUT/POST and DELETE are used to specify the method of the operation. The URI does not contain method information.
The scoping information, used to identify the resource to perform the method on, is contained in the URI path.
The RESTful Web Service is described by and exposes a Web Application Description Language (WADL) file. It contains the URIs you can call, and what data to pass and get back. Use the OPTIONS method to return the WADL.
Roy is on the JSR311 expert group. JSR311 and Jersey, the reference implementation, are used to deliver RESTful web services in Ehcache server.