Concept
Representational state transfer (REST) is an
architectural style for distributed systems that supports linking text,
graphics, sound, video, and other such media. The web is one, and
probably the largest, system that conforms to the REST architectural
style.
At the heart of REST is the existence of resources that
can be located using a global identifier. Components on the network
communicate by exchanging representations of the resources, rather than
the resources themselves — for example a square may be represented by
its central point, the length of each side and the angle at which it
sits.
Trajectory
REST can be described as a post hoc
description — it had been around and in use for quite some time before a
name was applied to it. In that sense it is nothing new. Increasingly
organisations are considering REST as an alternative architectural style
to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) because of its
simplicity, scalability, portability, and reliability.
With REST,
components on the network need to know very little about a resource in
order to interact with it — only its global identifier and the action to
request, then how to interpret the representation that is returned.
Impact
Without
going into detail, RESTful systems conform to REST constraints, and
these constraints ensure, amongst other things, performance,
scalability, simplicity, portability, and reliability.
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