REST

Representational State Transfer

Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style that defines a set of constraints and properties based on HTTP. Web Services that conform to the REST architectural style, or RESTful web services, provide interoperability between computer systems on the Internet. REST-compliant web services allow the requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of web resources by using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations. Other kinds of web services, such as SOAP web services, expose their own arbitrary sets of operations.

"Web resources" were first defined on the World Wide Web as documents or files identified by their URLs. However, today they have a much more generic and abstract definition that encompasses everything or entity that can be identified, named, addressed, or handled, in any way whatsoever, on the web. In a RESTful web service, requests made to a resource's URI will elicit a response that may be in HTML, XML, JSON, or some other format. The response may confirm that some alteration has been made to the stored resource, and the response may provide hypertext links to other related resources or collections of resources. When HTTP is used, as is most common, the operations available are GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and other predefined CRUD HTTP methods.

By using a stateless protocol and standard operations, REST systems aim for fast performance, reliability, and the ability to grow, by re-using components that can be managed and updated without affecting the system as a whole, even while it is running.