Help needed on restful web services

[Jitesh Sinha]

I have a very basic question about rest.
we are designing a rest web service which is supposed to output two values in a single call.How can we do that?I was under impression that by using rest we can only send java.lang.String objects to the client(entity that consumes web service) and get only java.lang.String from clients.I know that all objects will have to be serializable to be transferred over the wire and that is how SOAP works.
Can we do something like this in rest ,wherein we construct a java custom object ,specify a serializer and deserializer and send the java custom object across to the client (and reverse)?

If yes,can I get a sample code?

[Bear Bibeault]

While HTTP only allows text to be returned as the response body, that text can be a representation of anything.

When complex data needs to be returned, the most common media types used are XML or JSON, which have media types of application/xml and application/json respectively.

Using these formats, you can exchange highly complex data.

[Bear Bibeault]

Sounds like you need some fundamental knowledge of REST that you are currently lacking.

I highly recommend reading through a good book on RESTful APIs. A couple I have liked are:

RESTful Web Services

RESTful Web Services Cookbook

The latter I found especially useful for understanding how to define a RESTful API without getting into implementation language or framework specifics.