Representational State Transfer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The terms “Representational State Transfer” and “REST” were introduced in 2000 in the doctoral dissertation of Roy Fielding,^[1] one of the principal authors of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) specification

REST’s proponents argue that the Web enjoyed the scalability and growth that it has had as a direct result of a few key design principles:

• Application state and functionality are divided into resources
• Every resource is uniquely addressable using a universal syntax for use in hypermedia links
• All resources share a uniform interface for the transfer of state between client and resource, consisting of
  • A constrained set of well-defined operations
  • A constrained set of content types, optionally supporting code on demand
• A protocol that is:
  • Client-server
  • Stateless
  • Cacheable
  • Layered

Representational State Transfer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia