Abstract: The development of E-commerce encourages more and more buyers to purchase products via the Internet. Although most of business websites provide comprehensive query functions to help buyers find out what they want, unfortunately, when it comes to huge quantities of queries of different products, this kind of human query in front of a screen becomes time-consuming and tedious. And it is not easy for programs to extract Web data from Web pages. One reason is that the structure of Web pages may change. This paper uses the thinking of Web service to solve this problem. Web data extraction is done through a kind of Web service, independent of Web pages, provided by the website. This paper analyzes the way of thinking behind REST (Representational State Transfer) and illuminates the central abstraction concept of resource and the feature of emphasizing the uniform interface, which distinguishes REST architecture style from other network-based architecture styles. It points that RESTful Web service is a better solution to build Web services, compared with SOAP-style Web service. Constructing a RESTful Web service which provides electronic product query service based on Apache CXF framework in the context of Spring technology, and based on this service, a data extraction client can obtain Web data conveniently using XML parser tools.

Key words: data extraction, Web service, REST, resource-oriented, uniform interface