What is REST

REST is acronym for REpresentational State Transfer. It is architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems and was first presented by Roy Fielding in 2000 in his famous dissertation.

Like any other architectural style, REST also does have it’s own 6 guiding constraints which must be satisfied if an interface needs to be referred as RESTful. These principles are listed below.

Guiding Principles of REST

• Client–server – By separating the user interface concerns from the data storage concerns, we improve the portability of the user interface across multiple platforms and improve scalability by simplifying the server components.
• Stateless – Each request from client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server. Session state is therefore kept entirely on the client.
• Cacheable – Cache constraints require that the data within a response to a request be implicitly or explicitly labeled as cacheable or non-cacheable. If a response is cacheable, then a client cache is given the right to reuse that response data for later, equivalent requests.
• Uniform interface – By applying the software engineering principle of generality to the component interface, the overall system architecture is simplified and the visibility of interactions is improved. In order to obtain a uniform interface, multiple architectural constraints are needed to guide the behavior of components. REST is defined by four interface constraints: identification of resources; manipulation of resources through representations; self-descriptive messages; and, hypermedia as the engine of application state.
• Layered system – The layered system style allows an architecture to be composed of hierarchical layers by constraining component behavior such that each component cannot “see” beyond the immediate layer with which they are interacting.
• Code on demand (optional) – REST allows client functionality to be extended by downloading and executing code in the form of applets or scripts. This simplifies clients by reducing the number of features required to be pre-implemented.

Resource

The key abstraction of information in REST is a resource. Any information that can be named can be a resource: a document or image, a temporal service, a collection of other resources, a non-virtual object (e.g. a person), and so on. REST uses a resource identifier to identify the particular resource involved in an interaction between components.

The state of resource at any particular timestamp is known as resource representation. A representation consists of data, metadata describing the data and hypermedia links which can help the clients in transition to next desired state.

The data format of a representation is known as a media type. The media type identifies a specification that defines how a representation is to be processed. A truly RESTful API looks like hypertext. Every addressable unit of information carries an address, either explicitly (e.g., link and id attributes) or implicitly (e.g., derived from the media type definition and representation structure).

Resource Methods

Other important thing associated with REST is resource methods to be used to perform the desired transition. A large number of people wrongly relate resource methods to HTTP GET/PUT/POST/DELETE methods.

Roy Fielding has never mentioned any recommendation around which method to be used in which condition. All he emphasizes is that it should be uniform interface. If you decide HTTP POST will be used for updating a resource – rather than most people recommend HTTP PUT – it’s alright and application interface will be RESTful.

Ideally, everything that is needed to change the resource state shall be part of API response for that resource – including methods and in what state they will leave the representation.

A REST Server simply provides access to resources and REST client accesses and modifies the resources using HTTP protocol. Here each resource is identified by URIs/ global IDs. REST uses various representation to represent a resource like text, JSON, XML but JSON is the most popular one.