what is the difference between rest and restful web services

Hi Frank,

REST (Representational state transfer) is a style of software architecture.RESTful is typically used to refer to web services that implement such an architecture.

A RESTful web service has following basic characteristics which are:

• Use HTTP methods explicitly.
• Be stateless.
• Expose directory structure-like URIs.
• Transfer XML, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), or both.