Representational State Transfer (REST) is a collection of principles for managing information over a computer network like the world wide web. The term originated in a 2000 doctoral dissertation about the web written by Roy Fielding, one of the principal authors of the HTTP protocol specification, and has quickly passed into widespread use in the networking community.
While REST originally referred to a collection of architectural principles (described below), people now often use the term in a looser sense to describe any simple web-based interface that uses XML and HTTP without the extra abstractions of RPC-based approaches like the web services SOAP protocol. Strictly speaking, it is possible (though not common) to design web service systems in accordance with Fielding's REST principles, and it is possible to design simple XML+HTTP interfaces that do not follow REST principles, so these two different uses of REST cause some confusion in technical discussions.
Systems that follow Fielding's REST principles are often referred to as RESTful; REST's most zealous advocates call themselves RESTafarians.
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Representational State Transfer (REST) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
