Representational State Transfer

Representational State Transfer is also known as REST and RESTful.

There is an ongoing discussion in the standards world whether or not to adopt SOAP or RESTful approaches as the unique truth to achieve interoperable happiness. OSGeo will probably not go either way but look at both and collect some useful information here on these pages.

Introduction

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REST

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term was introduced in the doctoral dissertation in 2000 by Roy Fielding,[1], one of the principal authors of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) specification, and has come into widespread use in the networking community.

REST strictly refers to a collection of network architecture principles that outline how resources are defined and addressed. The term is often used in a looser sense to describe any simple interface that transmits domain-specific data over HTTP without an additional messaging layer such as SOAP or session tracking via HTTP cookies. These two meanings can conflict as well as overlap.