What Is REST?

REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is an Internet communication protocol.

REST-compliant, or

RESTful

, machines communicate with each other using stateless messaging. With this mode of communication, neither the sender nor receiver knows the state of the other, and the sender does not expect the receiver to acknowledge receipt of a message. REST enables client and server to be separate because neither needs to know the inner workings of the other as long as they agree on the format of the messages passed between them.

REST is based on

resources

. Resources are objects that can be acted upon. For example, an object might be a car, its attributes stored in a database; attributes such as color, make, model, size, and so on. We can retrieve the attributes of one or all of the cars in our database, creating a new car, updating one, or removing one.