3. REST, Resources, and Rails - 3.1 REST in a Rather Small Nutshell

REST: Representational State Transfer

3.1 REST in a Rather Small Nutshell

REST as a series of constraints imposed upon the interaction between system components. Basically, you start with the general proposition of machines that can talk to each other, and you start ruling some practices in and others out by imposing constraints that include (among others):

• Use of a client-server architecture
• Stateless communication
• Explicit signaling of response cacheability
• Use of HTTP request methods such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE

The World Wide Web allows for REST-compliant communication. It also allows for violations of REST principles; the constraints aren’t always all there unless you put them there.