Representational State Transfer (REST)

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a type of software architecture that is designed for distributed hypermedia systems, such as the web. The REST architectural style can be summarized as four main verbs: GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. These verbs pertain to the HTTP 1.1 specification and the nouns which are the resources available on the network via a URI. Please note that REST is not a standard itself and implementation for its support varies. However, REST does use standards such as HTTP, URL, Resource Representations (XML/HTML/GIF/JPEG/etc.) and Mime-Types (text/xml, text/html, image/gif/etc.). REST is based on a client-server architecture using the pull-based interaction style. It is stateless and as a result, each request from a client to a server must contain all the information necessary to understand the request. It cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server. The basis for REST is the use of nouns that represent resources identified with the URI and a set of verbs, which define actions for the nouns.