What is REST?

Roy Fielding describes Representation State Transfer(or REST) as an important architectural feature that define the World Wide Web(WWW) today. 

"REST emphasizes scalability of component interactions, generality of interfaces, independent deployment of components, and intermediary components to reduce interaction latency, enforce security, and encapsulate legacy systems."

Basic Flow of simple REST implementation.

i) Online publisher made available content(e.g in XML)

ii) Subscriber, using the URL, read the XML via browser, 

iii) data gets interpreted and reformatted and re-packaged to be use.

REST has advocate the requirement for a uniform interface.

REST requires the use of a common, generalized, generic interface. It does not permit application-specific interfaces. 

In the WWW, the REST interface is defined by the HTTP interface, which supports four basic application methods: GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE."