Can anybody tell the difference between REST and RESTful services?

Question

it has been 2 days i gone through more than 20 to 30 articles without a solution. this is my need,

Current Scenario:

i have a Drupal website, it has two interfaces, where the user can access authenticated content by logging in. All the authenticated content will be coming as JSON responses from a dozen REST services in salesforce which we are calling as authenticated service because it happens once the user has been authenticated by salesforce and the communication established through sessionid or access_token.

Issue:

There are situations where some of the usecases, for example New User Registration on Drupal website which needs to access salesforce REST service. Now, my issue is how to write unauthenticated REST service which can be used by Drupal. That service should get the user details as input and creates a portal user in salesforce. Only we can get a sessionid if the user is authenticated and using sessionid we can access the REST services. But in this case, do we have a solution?

Somebody told to try with RESTful service. I dont know how it is going to work for my issue and how the unauthenticated REST service differs from authenticated REST service?

Can someone shed some lights on this?

Answer 1

Edit: Apex REST Web Services can now be availed to Force.com Site Guest Users, see tutorial.

Can anybody tell the difference between REST and RESTful services?

The REST API is available out of the box for all Objects in all Orgs. You don't need to write any server-side code to use it. The endpoints look like:

https://na1.salesforce.com/services/data/v20.0/sobjects/Account/001D000000INjVe​

---

Apex REST Web Services are methods exposed on @annotated custom Apex classes which you create yourself. The endpoints look like:

https://na1.salesforce.com/services/apexrest/namespace/ClassName/YourParam

---

• both variants are subject to your total API request limits
• you can Enable Apex Class Access on a Force.com Site to expose an Apex REST Web Service

My issue is how to write unauthenticated REST service which can be used by Drupal?

What about collecting the new user data in Drupal, unauthenticated, then doing a callout from your webserver, and finally returning the data to the (now) portal user? (This spawns new users which cost money, and your webserver holds the keys to the kingdom...)

Here's an example REST Web Service you could expose:

go to Setup > Develop > Sites, and create a new Force.com Site, first)

@RestResource(urlMapping='/NewUseService/*')
global with sharing class NewUserService {
  @HttpPost
  static global Id createPortalUser() {
    Account account = [SELECT Name FROM Account LIMIT 1];
    User user = new User(
      Username          = '[email protected]',
      Email             = '[email protected]',
      CommunityNickname = 'Derp Herpinson'
    );
    Id userId = Site.createPortalUser(user, account.Id, 'secret');
    return userId;
  }
}

Here's an example PHP implementation of the code you might need in Drupal:

/**    
 * Call the Apex REST Web Service containing your logic.    
 */    
$curl = curl_init();    
curl_setopt_array($curl, array(    
  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => TRUE,    
  CURLOPT_URL            => $response->instance_url . '/services/apexrest/NewUserService',
  CURLOPT_POST           => TRUE,    
));    
$response = curl_exec($curl);    
var_export($response);    
//"003000000000123"

This code is mostly fabricated but hopefully it gets you started :^] also, if you are surfacing data "on behalf of" the new user, don't forget you'll need to make another login API call.