Representational State Transfer (REST)
Representational State Transfer (REST) is a software architectural style that defines a set of constraints to be used for creating Web services
- Snippet from Wikipedia: REST
REST (Representational state transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to guide the design and development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of an Internet-scale distributed hypermedia system, such as the Web, should behave. The REST architectural style emphasises the scalability of interactions between components, uniform interfaces, independent deployment of components, and the creation of a layered architecture to facilitate caching of components to reduce user-perceived latency, enforce security, and encapsulate legacy systems.
REST has been employed throughout the software industry to create stateless, reliable Web-based applications. An application that obeys the REST constraints may be informally described as RESTful, although this term is more commonly associated with the design of HTTP-based APIs and what are widely considered best practices regarding the "verbs" (HTTP methods) a resource responds to while having little to do with REST as originally formulated—and is often even at odds with the concept.