REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is a software
architecture style of the World Wide Web. Systems and web services which
follows the REST architecture are also known as RESTful systems/web services.
In REST Architecture everything is a resource, REST interfaces
with external systems using resources identified by Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), for example /Books/WingsOfFire,
which can be operated upon using standard HTTP methods, such as PUT /Books/WingsOfFire
.
RESTful systems are light weight, highly scalable, stateless
and maintainable and are very commonly used to create APIs for web based
applications.
RESTful systems usually communicates over HTTP and leverages
the capabilities of HTTP methods- GET, POST, PUT, DELETE etc. which browsers
typically use to retrieve web pages.
