REST architecture

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. It is an architectural style founded by Roy Fielding in 2000 and was stated in his PhD dissertation. He stated that REST "provides a set of architectural constraints that, when applied as a whole, emphasizes scalability of component interactions, generality of interfaces, independent deployment of components, and intermediary components to reduce interaction latency, enforce security, and encapsulate legacy systems.".

REST is an architectural style for a network-based application and HTTP 1.1 was based on it, as it was developed in parallel to HTTP 1.1.

A RESTful system or RESTful web service must abide by the following six constraints; otherwise, it will not be considered as RESTful or REST-compliant. While reading and understanding the following mentioned constraints, think about the modern web as an example of REST architecture.