REST Web Service Interview Questions

Here I am putting 20 REST questions. Please read some tutorial on REST before taking up these questions. Simply mugging up the answers will not give you the confidence for interview.

Some questions may not be applicable to eveyone. For example if you have used anything else than CXF or RESTLET for building REST web services then the question number 15 may not hold good for you

If you are unable to get answer to any of the question, do drop a comment, I will be more than happy to get back with the answer...

1) What is a web service?

2) Can I use GET request instead of PUT to create resources?

3) What is the difference between a RESTful web service (on HTTP) and a HTTP Servlet both of which perform the same function?

4) How will you migrate from SOAP web service to RESTfull web service?

5) What is the difference between HTTP POST and PUT requests?

6) What all kind of output formats can one generate using RESTful web service?

7) What all tools have you used to write RESTful web service?

8) Can my web browser be a client to RESTful web service? If yes then how will you generate DELETE request from web browser?

9) What is meant by JAX-WS and JAX-RS?

10) How is JAXB related to RESTful web services?

11) How will you handle synchronization issues when multiple clients try to consume web service simultaneously?

12) Can you describe any one RESTful web service you have written?

13) What will you do when an error code has to be returned to the client

OR

How will you handle application error scenarios in RESTful web service

14) Is it mandatory to use HTTP protocol for performing CRUD operations by a REST based web service?

15) What are the pros and cons of using the RESTLET framework than CXF for writing RESTful web service?

16) Can one RESTful web service be a client to another RESTful web service for performing business operations? Describe with example?

17) Can you generate HTML output from a RESTful web service? How?

18) Can a RESTful web service generate output in various formats based on some parameter received from the client.

19) With a RESTful web service, whose state is getting transferred and how?

20) Who owns the specification for REST web services and how does it get updated to newer versions?

From http://extreme-java.blogspot.com/2011/05/rest-web-service-interview-questions.html

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Zqudlyba Navis replied on Mon, 2011/05/23 - 5:59am

If you claim to be doing REST without doing HATEOAS, you're not doing REST at all. The ultimate test for REST compliance at the highest level is HATEOAS.