What is REST?

Representational state transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. As such, it is not just a method for building "web services." The terms "representational state transfer" and "REST" were introduced in 2000 in the doctoral dissertation of Roy Fielding,[1] one of the principal authors of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) specification.

REST is a method of managing resources over HTTP. There are a number of methods of interacting with resources via REST.

Systems which follow Fielding’s REST principles are often referred to as "RESTful".