Drabble Cascade has 'rest' as the word for the week... This is not the 'rest' I'm going to write.

[charisstoma]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer

Representational state transfer (REST) or RESTful web services are one way of providing interoperability between computer systems on the internet. REST-compliant web services allow requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of web resources using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations. Other forms of web service exist, which expose their own arbitrary sets of operations such as via WSDL and SOAP.[1] 'Web resources' were first defined on the World Wide Web as documents or files identified by their URLs, but today they have a much more generic and abstract definition encompassing every 'thing' or entity that can be identified, named, addressed or handled, in any way whatsoever, in the web. In a REST web service, requests made to a resource's URI will elicit a response that may be in XML, HTML, JSON or some other defined format. The response may confirm that some alteration has been made to the stored resource, and it may provide hypertext links to other related resources or collections of resources. Using HTTP, as is most common, the kind of operations available include those predefined by the HTTP verbs GET, POST, PUT, DELETE and so on. By making use of a stateless protocol and standard operations REST systems aim for fast performance, reliability, and the ability to grow, by using reusable components that can be managed and updated without affecting the system as a whole, even while it is running.

The term representational state transfer was introduced and defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding in his doctoral dissertation.[2][3] Fielding used REST to design HTTP 1.1 and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI).[4][5][6] The term is intended to evoke an image of how a well-designed web application behaves: It is a network of web resources (a virtual state-machine) where the user progresses through the application by selecting links, such as /user/tom, and operations such as GET or DELETE (state transitions), resulting in the next resource (representing the next state of the application) being transferred to the user for their use.



Or there is this which is clearer to me http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/definition/REST

REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is an architectural style, and an approach to communications that is often used in the development of Web services. The use of REST is often preferred over the more heavyweight SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) style because REST does not leverage as much bandwidth, which makes it a better fit for use over the Internet. The SOAP approach requires writing or using a provided server program (to serve data) and a client program (to request data).

https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm
CHAPTER 5

Representational State Transfer (REST)