RESTful web services are loosely coupled, lightweight web services that are particularly well suited for creating APIs for clients spread out across the internet. And to build Web services that are lightweight, maintainable, and scalable in nature. A service which is built on the REST architecture is called a RESTful service. The underlying protocol for REST is HTTP, which is the basic web protocol. REST stands for Representational State Transfer.

We do have different types of frameworks to Develop Rest API, the following frameworks are widely used for API implementation.

1. Apache CXF

2. Jersey, the reference implementation from Sun (now Oracle)

3. RESTeasy, JBoss's implementation

4. Restlet

5. WebSphere Application Server from IBM