Representational state transfer
REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to guide the design and development of the architecture for the World Wide Web.
REST has been used to create many scalable, reliable web-based applications. An application that follows the REST architectural style can be described as RESTful.
REST describes a way for computer systems (clients and servers) to communicate with each other. Clients do not need to know anything about the server but can instead discover what information is available by querying the server. For example, a web browser (a client) used to read the New York Times can discover more content by clicking on the links in the webpage returned by the server. The ability to discover what information the server has to offer is a central part of the REST architectural style.
Web clients and servers communicate using the HTTP protocol. Web content is delivered to clients as HTML documents that contain more links (URLs) that allow more content to be discovered. HTTP, HTML and URL are the three standards that together implement the REST architectural style in the World Wide Web.
Representational State Transfer Media
Roy Fielding speaking at OSCON 2008
An entity-relationship model of the concepts expressed in the REST architectural style
