Representational state transfer

Representational state transfer (REST) or RESTful web services are one way of providing interoperability between computer systems on the Internet.

REST-compliant web services allow requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of web resources using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations.

The term REST stands for representational state transfer.

Description

REST is a coordinated set of constraints applied to the design of components in a distributed hypermedia system that can lead to a more performant and maintainable software architecture.

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web represents the largest implementation of a system conforming to the REST architectural style.

REST has gained widespread acceptance across the Web as a simpler alternative to SOAP and WSDL-based web services.

RESTful systems typically, but not always, communicate over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol with the same HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.) used by web browsers to retrieve web pages and send data to remote servers.

See also

• Architectural pattern
• Backbone.js
• HTML
• Hypermedia
• Java API for RESTful Web Services
• Scalability
• SOAP
• Software architecture
• Web server
• Web service
• Web Services Description Language
• World Wide Web

External links

• Representational state transfer @ Wikipedia
• Overview of RESTful API Description Languages @ Wikipedia