REST is acronym for REpresentational State Transfer. It is architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems and was first presented by Roy Field

What is REST

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2021-06-11 21:30:04

REST is acronym for REpresentational State Transfer. It is architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems and was first presented by Roy Fielding in 2000 in his famous dissertation.

Like any other architectural style, REST also does have it’s own 6 guiding constraints which must be satisfied if an interface needs to be referred as RESTful. These principles are listed below.

The key abstraction of information in REST is a resource. Any information that can be named can be a resource: a document or image, a temporal service, a collection of other resources, a non-virtual object (e.g. a person), and so on. REST uses a resource identifier to identify the particular resource involved in an interaction between components.

The state of the resource at any particular timestamp is known as resource representation. A representation consists of data, metadata describing the data and hypermedia links which can help the clients in transition to the next desired state.

The data format of a representation is known as a media type. The media type identifies a specification that defines how a representation is to be processed. A truly RESTful API looks like hypertext. Every addressable unit of information carries an address, either explicitly (e.g., link and id attributes) or implicitly (e.g., derived from the media type definition and representation structure).

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