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    <p>REST is an oft misunderstood term. The precise definition can of course be found in Fielding's <a href="http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm" rel="noreferrer">dissertation</a>, and is attempted explained in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer" rel="noreferrer">Wikipedia entry</a>. In short it's an architectural style, and has nothing technically to do with HTTP or the web. HTTP and a lot of the web, however enable and follow the REST architectural style.</p> <p>But in truth the term REST has been watered down and it now is almost synonymous with <em>HTTP based API</em> of some sort.</p> <p>When developers talk about implementing or using a REST API they usually mean something along the lines of documenting URI templates for all their resources, and use GET to retrieve something, PUT to modify something, DELETE to delete something and POST to do anything else (like create or accept or modify something), like the <a href="http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method:-statuses%C2%A0update" rel="noreferrer">Twitter API to update ones status</a> or <a href="http://soapi.info/rest/api" rel="noreferrer">StackOverflow's own API</a> or <a href="http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/group" rel="noreferrer">Facebook's API</a>.</p> <p>These APIs typically</p> <ul> <li>give each interesting thing (resource) in their system their own URI</li> <li>use the "uniform interface" (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE) on these URIs to work with the resources</li> <li>use standard types of authentication schemes (like OAuth or OpenID or even simpler variants)</li> <li>are stateless, in that each request is independent of any previous request</li> </ul> <p>All these are good, and required of REST architectures, but alone aren't enough to follow the academic REST</p> <p>I think this is a fitting description for REST as it is now. There are a few people who understand the difference between <em>Corporate REST</em> and <em>Academic REST</em> but their numbers are dwindling.</p> <p>But that's the topic of another question, just search for HATEOAS.</p>
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    1. POWhat are REST web services?
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    1. COI wish this answer was on one of the other "What is REST" questions, so we could close this one. Maybe some kind soul with lots of rep will merge them one day.
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    2. COI looked for another "What is REST" question before posting it actually... But they were all "how to do this" or "is this better than soap". A concise "What is REST" is actually a good question.
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    3. COYes it would be nice to have, but the problem with the generic "What is REST" types of questions is they tend to get lots of very shallow answers very quickly, and usually the most popular answer gets voted as correct even if it is a poor answer. Check out some of the questions with the highest votes in the REST tag and you will see what I mean.
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