Representational State Transfer (REST or ReST) is a software architecture style for building scalable Web services. It relies on a stateless, client-server, and cacheable communications protocol. REST is a simple way to manage communication between independent systems. It is inspired by HTTP and HTTP is used in virtually all cases (though it is not limited to HTTP only). Actually, the four most common actions, view, create, edit, and delete, map directly to the HTTP verbs that are already implemented: GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. So in the case of REST APIs, we use these verbs a lot.
Before we go ahead and talk about the verbs, let's discuss a bit more about REST APIs. The term REST was coined by Roy T. Fielding in his PhD thesis (you can have a look at the thesis at http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm). The primary idea behind REST is to have one standard interface for any service. Instead of exposing an interface with methods, we expose a few...
