Im confused regarding the need of REST for a web service.Im a noob when it comes to web service,the scalability etc.
This is my requirement
-Need to fetch some data eg:names of students in a class and their photographs plus their address and stuff
-There is no authenciation/Tokens required since the data is publicly available
My question is
-Do i need to use REST for this? Will MYSQL+PHP Webservice that communicates using HTTP GET and POST do the job?
-If i go with this approach will this affect the performance of the app,when there is bulk data and will it scale?The maximum number of users that may be using the app is just 50 at a time.
-Does REST offer significant advantages,since i dont know JSON and stuff,will it payoff the learning curve?
You can implement any protocol you want to do that, but using REST ensure you are following a common procedure which will make your application more maintainable.
The amount of resources used depends how do you implement the queries and responses on the server-side.
You should learn that, it will improve your knowledge as you can learn together other patterns (gateway, repository, MVC) to make your server-side professional and maintainable.
My suggestion for your application is implementing the server-side using a framework such as Laravel (I recommend), CakePHP or similar. I say that because your app seems to be just interaction with pre-defined models.
It's better to use REST. You can just post your data as HTTP or as JSON and then process this data in your function and return result as JSON .
I recommend you to use CakePHP or Yii because it's easy to use.
In case of bulk transaction you can use MongoDb as your database.
What I would say is that REST describes a way to leverage HTTP features and use them in an optimal way. Otherwise you don't have to use all the REST mechanisms to implement a RESTful application.
I think that this link could help you to understand how to implement a Web API (i.e. a RESTful application):
Here are my answers to your questions:
REST doesn't require an authentication to access resources. However REST integrates authentication mechanisms based on the HTTP header Authorization.
REST describes good practices in using HTTP but of course, you're free to use it as you want ;-) REST recommends to use the HTTP methods for what they actually are. To be short, GET to retrieve data, PUT / POST to update data (POST mainly to add data and PUT to update them) and DELETE to delete data. POST can also be used for what we can see as actions. REST also uses specific URIs with path variables. If I use your example, the URI for a list of students within a class would be: /classrooms/<classid>/students. REST also define a mechanism to request specific content format such as JSON based on the header Accept. In fact, you're generally familiar with most of these aspects if you implement Web applications for some years and REST provides you a way to design your application to leverage them at best.
Regarding performance, I would say no. One of the key aspect of REST is that RESTful applications are stateless. No state must be handled on the server side. This allows applications to scale more readily. I don't see any reason for bad performances regarding bulk updates. In fact, it's up to you to handle them. REST leaves the choice of the data format content sent to the server and the way to handle them efficiently on the server side. You can consider using either synchronous and asynchronous approach. For the asynchronous approach, you should return an HTTP status code 202. This approach can allow you to control the work load of updates for concurrent users. You could add the bulk updates to a queue and handle them after one per one in a separate process or thread. An example of RESTful application that uses bulk updates is ElasticSearch. See this link: http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/bulk.html.
The main advantage of REST is that it allows you to leverage HTTP mechanisms at best. Another thing that comes to mind is that there is now some tools allowing you to generate client kits to consume your application and generate documentations about the contract of your RESTful applications. See Swagger (Swagger, Swagger UI, Swagger Codegen) and RAML. These links can help you: http://swagger.io/ and http://raml.org/. Another tool, Restlet Studio (http://studio.restlet.com/#/), can help you to understand all these concepts since it comes with a sample application. Regarding the learning curve, I don't think that it's too much important since if you already implement web application, you know most of concepts.
Regarding the format you would use for content, JSON seems to be a good fit. However REST doesn't enforce any content kind. It provides a mechanism to request a specific content (Conneg, i.e. content negotiation based on the header Accept) but you don't have to use it. REST let you the way to manage this content within your application.
Hope it heps you, Thierry