How to differentiate between a normal get post handling and rest architecture

Hi,

I am new to web 2.0 and REST.I have read some articles on REST .I could understand that the REST is a design pattern and in this , every item/thing to be exposed is treated as a URL.The client will hit this URL and get the resource.

So, I am confused that a normal get request on a URL, that is send on a servlet and processed.Is this the REST way.If yes , then we are doing it since the start of coding what's new in this. If no then please explain what extra needs to be done.

thanks in advance
mayur

REST uses a remote resource as an url instead of the elaborate remote procedure call.

Actually, I think you're pretty much correct - REST is a lot like the very first web pages a lot of us built, where a single URL corresponds to a single chunk of information. That resemblance is intentional, as REST was modeled in part on the early web.

One difference arises when you start to look at more complicated applications - instead of a multitude of pages, you get one (or a few) endpoints that you can access, each of which distributes your request to any one of many destinations.

Another difference is the restriction of actions to particular HTTP verbs - GET, in a RESTful system, for instance, is idempotent. POST is used to create a new resource. PUT is used to update an existing resource (or create a new one, in certain cases). DELETE is used to destroy an existing resource.