February 2010
Beginner
400 pages
11h 13m
English
Content preview from Introducing .NET 4.0: with Visual Studio 2010
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
Start your free trial
16.9. Let's REST for a Minute
REST stands for Representational State Transfer and is a style of architecture introduced by a guy named Roy Fielding (one of the main authors of HTTP). You can read about what Roy proposed at www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm.
Applications implementing Roy's proposed architecture are sometimes described as RESTful. I don't want to get into a debate about what exactly constitutes a RESTful system (some people who probably need to get out a bit more feel scarily passionate about this), but the important points to note are the following:
Everything is abstracted into a resource that is accessible by a unique address.
REST applications don't maintain state between requests.
These two characteristics ...