REST

The web service is based on Representational State Transfer, or REST. This simply means that each resource can be referenced by its own URL, and the actions performed on that resource correspond to HTTP methods. For instance, to fetch data you would issue a GET request for the desired resource with any options specified as query parameters.

POST is used to create resources, PUT to update them, and DELETE for removal. POST and PUT requests usually have a request body to specify the contents of the resource that should be created or updated. In this case, the request body should be passed as JSON that closely matches the response format, although not all attributes will necessarily need to be specified.

Generally speaking, HTTP status codes are used appropriately for each response. For instance, 422 Unprocessable Entity is given when validation fails for the given input.

The response format given by the web service is JSON, which is a lightweight data-interchange format. It's a simpler format than XML that also has the advantage of being used directly by the browsers' JavaScript implementations.