Concept
Representational State Transfer is intended to evoke an image of how a well-designed Web application behaves: presented with a network of Web pages (a virtual state-machine), the user progresses through an application by selecting links (state transitions), resulting in the next page (representing the next state of the application) being transferred to the user and rendered for his use.
REST was initially described in the context of HTTP, but it is not limited to that protocol. RESTful architectures may be based on other Application Layer protocols if they already provide a rich and uniform vocabulary for applications based on the transfer of meaningful representational state. RESTful applications maximize the use of the existing, well-defined interface and other built-in capabilities provided by the chosen network protocol, and minimize the addition of new application-specific features on top of it.
Read more about this topic: Representational State Transfer
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