REST In and Out

One man, Roy Fielding, did ask these questions in his doctoral thesis, “Architectural

Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures.”

* In it, he identifies

specific architectural principles that answer the following questions:

• Why is the Web so prevalent and ubiquitous?

• What makes the Web scale?

• How can I apply the architecture of the Web to my own applications?

The set of these architectural principles is called REpresentational State Transfer (REST) :

Addressable resources

The key abstraction of information and data in REST is a resource, and each resource

must be addressable via a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier).

A uniform, constrained interface

Use a small set of well-defined methods to manipulate your resources.

Representation-oriented

You interact with services using representations of that service. A resource referenced

by one URI can have different formats. Different platforms need different

formats. For example, browsers need HTML, JavaScript needs JSON (JavaScript

Object Notation), and a Java application may need XML.

Communicate statelessly

Stateless applications are easier to scale.

Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State (HATEOAS)

Let your data formats drive state transitions in your applications.