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REST

Representational State Transfer (REST) is an abstraction of the World Wide Web.

A web service is "RESTful" if it conforms to the following constraints:

Whereas SOAP is a protocol, REST is an architectural style. As such, there is no "official" standard for RESTful web APIs. Nevertheless, a RESTful implementation such as the Web can use standards like HTTP, URI, XML, etc.

Under the uniform interface constraint, resources are identified by URIs, and standard HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) act on those resources. A GET request against a resource's URI, for example, can return an XML representation of that resource: 

Request:

GET /books/123321 HTTP/1.1
Host: api.example.com
Accept: application/xml

Response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/xml

<book id="123321">
   <title>Harry Potter</title>
   <author>J. K. Rowling</author>
   <price>22.90</price>
</book>