Representational State Transfer (REST)

What is REST?

REST, short for "Representational State Transfer," is a collection of design principles aimed at enabling interaction between multiple software systems in a distributed system. It was proposed in 2000 by Roy Fielding and is primarily used in the design of web services.

REST is based on four key design principles:

1. Stateless Protocol: No state management, such as session handling, is performed (e.g., using stateless protocols like HTTP).
2. Predefined Operations: A shared set of predefined commands for manipulating resources, such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE.
3. Unique Identification of Resources: All resources are uniquely identified using a universal syntax, such as URIs or URLs.
4. Hypermedia Representation: Information can include links to other information or resources in a hypermedia format.

A system adhering to these principles is referred to as a RESTful system, and the APIs enabling interaction between such systems are called RESTful APIs. However, in a broader sense, the term REST can also loosely refer to systems using HTTP and XML to manipulate resources.