Difference between rest webservices and traditional request response

Question

I am a bit confused about the difference between the two.

What I have been making till now is just deploying a web application that gets invoked by a URL and returns a response(json/XML) .

what I have read about rest web services

Its a way to communicate with web applications and to reveal your methods to the world.

Question 1

But in my case I did the same revealing the URL .

Platform independent

The rest features say that its Language-independent (C# can talk to Java)

Question 2

But in traditional approach also any language can invoke any web service by simple request (get/post) which ever implemented.

Question 3

What is rest and how to get started with it (specifically in terms of django) if possible.?

Answer 1

You are doing REST.

REST is not a library, or a format, it's simply a technique. What you call the "traditional approach" is exactly what REST is: simple requests via GET and POST (as well as PUT and DELETE) to an endpoint that returns JSON or XML.

That is in contrast to the previously-dominant way of making API requests, ie SOAP, which requires all sorts of up-front configuration of WSDL files and service discovery, along with particularly specified request formats.