Understanding HTTP and REST

REST means Representational State Transfer. The REST architecture style was a PhD dissertation by Roy T. Fielding titled Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software. This paper was first published in 2000 after a 6 year study. We can be thankful to Mr. Fielding for the research work and findings.

The modern-day API is modeled around REST, and you will hear people mentioning, it's not RESTful or questioned, is your API RESTful?

To create and model a well-defined API, you need to have sound knowledge of REST. For this reason, we will delve a bit deeper into Roy T. Fielding's study.

Roy T. Fielding set out to fix a few problems that showed their head in 1993. Many authors were publishing their work on the web, and they wanted to collaborate. The web became a great place to share and discuss research work. However, no sooner had it got popular did it become troublesome.

There seem to be missing standards in terms of how documents were published and how they could be edited. There were also problems related to infrastructure and speed, and editing and accessing documents was slow.

In this chapter, we will look into the following topics:

• Software architecture
• REST principles
• REST architectural elements
• HTTP
• HTTP/2
• The Richardson maturity model