The REST acronym stands for Representational State Transfer. It's an architectural style and a design for network-based software. It describes how one system can communicate a state with another. This fits perfectly well into the microservice world. As you will remember from Chapter 3, Working with Microservices, the software applications based on the microservices architecture is a bunch of separated, independent services talking to each other.
There are some concepts in REST that we need to understand, before we go further:
- resource: This is the main concept in the REST architecture. Any information can be a resource. A bank account, a person, an image, a book. A representation of a resource must be stateless
- representation: A specific way a resource can be represented. For example, a bank account resource can be represented using JSON, XML, or HTML...
