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Representational State Transfer (REST)
REST is a collection of architecture principles and a software architecture style to build network-enabled systems that define and access resources. REST often used like a framework to transmit data over a protocol such as HTTP without adding additional semantic layers or session management.
REST defines a strict separation of concerns between components that participate in a client-server system that simplifies the implementation of actors involved. REST also strives to simplify communication semantics in a network system to increase scalability and improve performance. REST relies on autonomous requests between participants in a message exchange, which implies that requests must include all information that a client or server requires to understand the context of the request. In a REST-based system, you use minimal sets of possible requests to exchange standard media types.
The REST principle uses uniform resource identifiers (URIs) to locate and access a given representation of a resource. The resource representation, known as representational state, can be created, retrieved, modified, or deleted.
One of the defining principles of REST is that it can exploit existing technologies, standards, and protocols pertaining to the Web, such as HTTP. This reliance on existing technologies and protocols makes REST easier to learn and simpler to use than most other Web-based messaging standards, because little additional overhead is required to enable effective information exchange.
A REST-based conversation operates within stateless conversations, thereby making it a prime facilitator for subscription-based technologies, such as RSS, RDF, OWL, and Atom, in which content is delivered to pre-subscribed clients.
Roy Thomas Fielding's dissertation, Architectural Styles and the Design of Network/based Software Architectures can be found here:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/fielding_dissertation.pdfRAD v7.5 includes the tooling to create REST services to access server-side artifacts through Web remote interfaces and to integrate Atom and RSS feeds.
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