22.4. Representational State Transfer (REST)

Representational State Transfer (REST) refers to an architectural style for implementing web services. Such web services are often called RESTful web services. Though REST itself is not a standard, RESTful web services are implemented using web standards. Each operation in a RESTful web service is identified by a unique URL. Thus, when the server receives a request, it immediately knows what operation to perform. Such web services can be used in a program or directly from a web browser. The results of a particular operation may be cached locally by the browser when the service is invoked with a GET request. This can make subsequent requests for the same operation faster by loading the result directly from the browser’s cache. Amazon’s web services (aws.amazon.com) are RESTful, as are many others.