REST was introduced in a doctoral thesis by Roy Fielding, best known for his work on HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and the extremely popular Apache web server. His thesis described a network of resources identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). As a user accesses these resources, the current state (that is, the contents of the page) is transferred to them.
The first implementation of this scheme was the World Wide Web. So, in a sense, by simply opening up a browser on a PC and making a request for a web page, you are making a REST request! More recently, the ideas behind Fielding's original thesis have been greatly expanded such that we now refer to RESTful web services, which can include software (or firmware) running on literally any device connected to the internet, making use of HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
- Documentation reference on REST: http://standards.rest/
- Roy Fielding...
