The uniform interface

This is the constraint that makes REST different from other network architecture patterns. The interfaces exposed by the components are generalized. The server does not have intimate knowledge of its consumers. It serves all requests from clients in the same way. What you get is coarse grained data, as not all consumers would want this amount of data.

To get a uniform interface, four constraints will have to be applied:

• Identifying resources
• Manipulating resources
• Self-descriptive messages
• Hypermedia as the engine of the application state

We will look into these later on.