Representative State Transfer (REST) is an architectural pattern that explains the technical underpinnings responsible for the tremendous success of the World Wide Web.
RESTful Services Guidance for Developers v1.0
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Representative State Transfer (REST) is an architectural pattern that explains the technical underpinnings responsible for the tremendous success of the World Wide Web. The REST pattern and supporting technologies not only support human focused web browser operations but also machine-to-machine information exchanges. In this document we focus on the latter. REST is less complicated than other approaches, easy for developers and users to understand, and easy to implement. Further, the approach is scalable to large enterprises due to a fundamental tenet of REST: stateless interactions. The same aspects of REST which drive companies such as Amazon and Google to use REST to deliver capability to their users make it an attractive and useful technology for the Department of Defense (DoD). The goal of this document is to introduce the REST pattern and to share lessons learned gathered through our own development efforts using REST for the DoD, and the study of current commercial practices. We cover both the REST concept in general and the supporting technologies needed to employ REST effectively for developing web services. The authors do not consider this document to be an authoritative mandate, but instead an informational snapshot of current practices for REST services that includes areas which are still evolving such as service security. Release of v1.0 is intended to serve as the vehicle for further review by a more extensive developer community. As required, revised versions of this document will be published.