What is REST?

REST (Representational State Transfer) is a term often used in software engineering when talking about services or other API's. A lot of these so-called RESTful services or interfaces are not RESTful at all. Even the author of REST gets frustrated by the common misuse; http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven: "I am getting frustrated by the number of people calling any HTTP-based interface a REST API.". REST is often confused with an application of REST to HTTP and URI (uniform resource identifier). An URI is a unique identifier to identify a web resource. HTTP is a transport protocol used to interact with the web resource. REST however is a bit more then just that. The division between resource identification and resource interaction is important. The application of REST uses the URI to identify a concept. In this blog post I will elaborate a bit more on REST while trying to avoid literally repeating other sources like Wikipedia. I will also provide some background and examples I found during my short study of the concept. In addition, this post will be introductory to other more (Oracle) implementation focused articles.