The REST architecture is strongly based on the HTTP protocol but does not require any specific kind of data format, and so it can transmit data in several formats such as plain text, JSON, Extensible Markup Language (XML), or binary (encoded as Base64).
Many web resources describe what the REST architectural paradigm is. One such can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer.
However, the concept of the REST architecture is quite simple. It is the purest extension of the ideas behind the World Wide Web (WWW) project.
The WWW project was born in 1989 as a global library of hypertexts. A hypertext is a document that contains links to other documents so that, by clicking repeatedly on the links, you can see many documents by using only your mouse. Such documents are scattered over the internet and are identified by a unique description, the Uniform Resource Locator (URL). The protocol to share such documents is HTTP, and the documents...
