Representational State Transfer, or REST, is an architectural style for networking software to transfer information through the web. REST is a simpler alternative to SOAP. The main principals of a RESTful architecture are:
- Use HTTP methods explicitly.
- Be stateless.
- Expose URI's that simulate a directory structure.
- Transfer XML, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), or both.
External References:
- Representational State Transfer on Wikipedia
- Representational State Transfer on Computerworld
