Guiding Principles of The Interface
The uniform interface that any REST interface must provide is considered fundamental to the design of any REST service.
- Identification of resources
- Individual resources are identified in requests, for example using URIs in web-based REST systems. The resources themselves are conceptually separate from the representations that are returned to the client. For example, the server does not send its database, but rather, perhaps, some HTML, XML or JSON that represents some database records expressed, for instance, in Swahili and encoded in UTF-8, depending on the details of the request and the server implementation.
- Manipulation of resources through these representations
- When a client holds a representation of a resource, including any metadata attached, it has enough information to modify or delete the resource on the server, provided it has permission to do so.
- Self-descriptive messages
- Each message includes enough information to describe how to process the message. For example, which parser to invoke may be specified by an Internet media type (previously known as a MIME type). Responses also explicitly indicate their cacheability.
- Hypermedia as the engine of application state (aka HATEOAS)
- Clients make state transitions only through actions that are dynamically identified within hypermedia by the server (e.g., by hyperlinks within hypertext). Except for simple fixed entry points to the application, a client does not assume that any particular action is available for any particular resources beyond those described in representations previously received from the server.
Read more about this topic: Representational State Transfer
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