What is REST?
REST stands for representational state transfer, which is a way for computers to communicate and interoperate with each other. It has become the de facto architectural style for web applications and the fact that it's built on top of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) makes it more powerful. HTTP is as widespread as the internet itself, and REST services can reuse the same infrastructure, without needing to open any special ports in the firewall. Besides, one can leverage HTTP methods such as GET
, POST
, PUT
, and so on to assign semantic meanings to the various operations on the server.
REST is extremely light weight and can be consumed/accessed by embedded devices or mobile devices where the computational power is low, and battery life is of high importance. This is because REST itself does not have any baggage on its own, as it relies heavily on the underlying HTTP machinery. Today HTTP/2 is spreading fast as a replacement for HTTP/1.1. With that, even the underlying HTTP...