Representational State Transfer

Representational State Transfer, commonly referred to as REST, is sometimes misrepresented, as it is by Paul Prescod (2002) as a "new model for [W]eb services construction." Actually, it is a style of building Web applications that was first formally described by Dr. Roy Fielding in his 2000 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California at Irvine (Fielding 2000). Dr. Fielding is a co-author, along with Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, of many of the core specifications of the World Wide Web, and a co-founder of the Apache Foundation. In his dissertation, he was attempting to describe the architectures of applications commonly in use on the Internet at the time, and REST was one of the architectures he identified. He wrote, "Over the past six years, the REST architectural style has been used to guide the design and development of the architecture for the modern Web" (Fielding 2000). Dr. Fielding was not proposing a way of building Web services; he was providing a formal description of how the specifications defined by him and Sir Timothy Berners-Lee and others were being used.

A REST server accepts a request from a client via an HTTP POST method. It responds with the URI of a resource, which is retrieved via an HTTP GET method.

XML documents may be used as input to, and output from, REST servers; indeed, they often are. However, those XML documents need not be SOAP XML documents; they typically are not.

There is no standard, machine-readable language for describing REST services, like the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Security is typically limited to the use of secure HTTP.

Nonetheless, the Windows Communication Foundation, as the universal infrastructure by which Windows software entities can communicate, supports the construction and use of REST services.