What is "restful"

Representative State Transfer (REST) is a software engineering technique for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term originated in the year 2000, in a doctoral dissertation1 (PHD) on the web written by Roy Fielding, one of the main authors of the HTTP protocol specification that is used by Internet sites.

REST (Representative State Transfer) is intended as a application design image will behave: a network of websites (a virtual state), where the user progresses with an application selecting links (state transitions), resulting in the next page (representing the next state of the application), is being transferred to the user and presented for their use.

- Dr.Roy Fielding

The term REST originally referred to a set of architectural principles (described below), nowadays it is used in the broadest sense to describe any simple web interface that uses XML and HTTP (or YAML, JSON, or plain text)without the additional abstractions of protocols based on message exchange patterns such as the SOAP web services protocol. It is possible to design web service systems according to the REST architectural style described by Fielding, and it is also possible to design XMLHTTP interfaces according to the RPC style but without using SOAP. These different uses of the term REST cause some confusion in technical discussions, where RPC is not an example of REST.

Systems that follow REST principles are often called Restful'.