What is REST Slightly confused

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I was under the assumption that REST was a web service but it seems that I am incorrect in thinking this - so  what is REST   I ve read through Wikipedia but still cant quite wrap my head around it  Why to do many places refer to API s as REST API s

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http   en wikipedia org wiki Representational State Transfer  The basic idea is that instead of having an ongoing connection to the server  you make a request  get some data  show that to a user  but maybe not all of it  and then when the user does something which calls for more data  or to pass some up to the server  the client initiates a change to a new state

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REST is an architectural style and a design for network-based software architectures   REST concepts are referred to as resources  A representation of a resource must be stateless  It is represented via some media type  Some examples of media types include XML  JSON  and RDF  Resources are manipulated by components  Components request and manipulate resources via a standard uniform interface  In the case of HTTP  this interface consists of standard HTTP ops e g  GET  PUT  POST  DELETE   REST is typically used over HTTP  primarily due to the simplicity of HTTP and its very natural mapping to RESTful principles  REST however is not tied to any specific protocol   Fundamental REST Principles  Client-Server Communication  Client-server architectures have a very distinct separation of concerns  All applications built in the RESTful style must also be client-server in principle   Stateless  Each client request to the server requires that its state be fully represented  The server must be able to completely understand the client request without using any server context or server session state  It follows that all state must be kept on the client  We will discuss stateless representation in more detail later   Cacheable  Cache constraints may be used  thus enabling response data to to be marked as cacheable or not-cachable  Any data marked as cacheable may be reused as the response to the same subsequent request   Uniform Interface  All components must interact through a single uniform interface  Because all component interaction occurs via this interface  interaction with different services is very simple  The interface is the same  This also means that implementation changes can be made in isolation  Such changes  will not affect fundamental component interaction because the uniform interface is always unchanged  One disadvantage is that you are stuck with the interface  If an optimization could be provided to a specific service by changing the interface  you are out of luck as REST prohibits this  On the bright side  however  REST is optimized for the web  hence incredible popularity of REST over HTTP   The above concepts represent defining characteristics of REST and differentiate the REST architecture from other architectures like web services  It is useful to note that a REST service is a web service  but a web service is not necessarily a REST service   See this blog post on REST Design Principals for more details on REST and the above principles

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REST is a software design pattern typically used for web applications  In layman s terms this means that it is a commonly used idea used in many different projects  It stands for REpresentational State Transfer  The basic idea of REST is treating objects on the server-side  as in rows in a database table  as resources than can be created or destroyed   The most basic way of thinking about REST is as a way of formatting the URLs of your web applications  For example  if your resource was called  posts   then    posts Would be how a user would access ALL the posts  for displaying    posts  id Would be how a user would access and view an individual post  retrieved based on their unique id    posts new Would be how you would display a form for creating a new post   Sending a POST request to  users would be how you would actually create a new post on the database level   Sending a PUT request to  users  id would be how you would update the attributes of a given post  again identified by a unique id   Sending a DELETE request to  users  id would be how you would delete a given post  again identified by a unique id   As I understand it  the REST pattern was mainly popularized  for web apps  by the Ruby on Rails framework  which puts a big emphasis on RESTful routes  I could be wrong about that though   I may not be the most qualified to talk about it  but this is how I ve learned it  specifically for Rails development    When someone refers to a  REST api   generally what they mean is an api that uses RESTful urls for retrieving data

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It stands for Representational State Transfer and it can mean a lot of things  but usually when you are talking about APIs and applications  you are talking about REST as a way to do web services or get programs to talk over the web    REST is basically a way of communicating between systems and does much of what SOAP RPC was designed to do  but while SOAP generally makes a connection  authenticates and then does stuff over that connection  REST works pretty much the same way that that the web works   You have a URL and when you request that URL you get something back  This is where things start getting confusing because people describe the web as a the largest REST application and while this is technically correct it doesn t really help explain what it is   In a nutshell  REST allows you to get two applications talking over the Internet using tools that are similar to what a web browser uses  This is much simpler than SOAP and a lot of what REST does is says   Hey  things don t have to be so complex    Worth reading    How I Explained REST to My Wife  now available here  Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures

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REST is not a specific web service but a design concept  architecture  for managing state information   The seminal paper on this was Roy Thomas Fielding s dissertation  2000    Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures   available online from the University of California  Irvine    First read Ryan Tomayko s post How I explained REST to my wife  it s a great starting point  Then read Fielding s actual dissertation   It s not that advanced  nor is it long  six chapters  180 pages    I know you kids in school like it short    EDIT  I feel it s pointless to try to explain REST   It has so many concepts like scalability  visibility  stateless  etc  that the reader needs to grasp  and the best source for understanding those are the actual dissertation   It s much more than POST GET etc

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