Representational State Transfer - Key Goals

Key Goals

Key goals of REST include:

• Scalability of component interactions
• Generality of interfaces
• Independent deployment of components
• Intermediary components to reduce latency, enforce security and encapsulate legacy systems

REST has been applied to describe the desired web architecture, to help identify existing problems, to compare alternative solutions, and to ensure that protocol extensions would not violate the core constraints that make the Web successful.

Fielding describes REST's effect on scalability thus:

REST's client–server separation of concerns simplifies component implementation, reduces the complexity of connector semantics, improves the effectiveness of performance tuning, and increases the scalability of pure server components. Layered system constraints allow intermediaries—proxies, gateways, and firewalls—to be introduced at various points in the communication without changing the interfaces between components, thus allowing them to assist in communication translation or improve performance via large-scale, shared caching. REST lets intermediate processing by constraining messages be self-descriptive: interaction is stateless between requests, standard methods and media types are used to indicate semantics and exchange information, and responses explicitly indicate cacheability.