Overview
REST stands for Representational State Transfer. REST relies on a stateless, client-server, cache-able communications protocol and in virtually all cases, the HTTP protocol is used.
REST is an architecture style for designing network applications. Rather than using complex mechanisms, such as SOAP to connect between machines, simple HTTP is used to make calls between machines.
RESTful applications use the HTTP requests to post data (create and/or update), read data (for example, make queries), and delete data. Thus, REST uses HTTP for all four CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) operations. REST is a lightweight alternative to mechanisms, such as RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) and web services (SOAP, WSDL, and so on). Despite being simple, REST is fully-featured; there is nothing you can do in web services that cannot be done with a RESTful architecture.