REST

REpresentational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style for designing Web Services, which is heavily centered on the notion of "resources" that is core to the World Wide Web.

REST is NOT a standard!

Most often, so-called RESTful Web Services communicate over HTTP and expose resources using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).

RESTful Web Services rely on HTTP semantics and HTTP verbs (e.g., GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, ...).

REST was defined by Roy Fielding in his 2000 PhD dissertation (Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures). Note that Roy Fielding is one of the main authors of the HTTP specification and the co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server project.

At the core, the main goals of REST are to:

• create loosely coupled applications
• create scalable applications
• create performant applications
• simplify interfaces

To realize these goals, REST defines a set principles and constraints.