RESTful Java Web Services - Third Edition

The representation of resources

The representation of resources is what is sent back and forth between clients and servers in a RESTful system. A representation is a temporal state of the actual data located in a storage device at the time of request. In general terms, it is a binary stream, together with its metadata, which describes how the stream is to be consumed by the client. The metadata can also contain extra information about the resource, for example, validation, encryption information, or extra code to be executed at runtime.

Throughout the life of a web service, there may be a variety of clients requesting resources. Different clients can consume different representations of the same resource. Therefore, a representation can take ...