What is the difference between HTTP and REST?

After reading a lot about the differences between REST and SOAP, I got the impression that REST is just another word for HTTP. Can someone explain what functionality REST adds to HTTP?

Note: I'm not looking for a comparison of REST versus SOAP.

No, REST is the way HTTP should be used.

Today we only use a tiny bit of the HTTP protocol's methods – namely GET and POST. The REST way to do it is to use all of the protocol's methods.

For example, REST dictates the usage of DELETE to erase a document (be it a file, state, etc.) behind a URI, whereas, with HTTP, you would misuse a GET or POST query like ...product/?delete_id=22.

HTTP is a protocol used for communication, usually used to communicate with internet resources or any application with a web browser client.

REST means that the main concept you are using while designing the application is the Resource: for each action you want to perform you need to define a resource on which you usually do only CRUD operation, which is a simple task. for that its very convenient to use 4 verbs used in HTTP protocol against the 4 CRUD operations (GET for Read, POST is for CREATE, PUT is for UPDATE and DELETE is for DELETE). that's unlike the older concept of RPC (Remote Procedure Call), in which you have a set of actions you want to perform as a result of the user's call. if you think for example on how to describe a facebook like on a post, with RPC you might create services called AddLikeToPost and RemoveLikeFromPost, and manage it along with all your other services related to FB posts, thus you won't need to create special object for Like. with REST you will have a Like object which will be managed separately with Delete and Create functions. It also means it will describe a separate entity in your db. that might look like a small difference, but working like that would usually yield a much simpler code and a much simpler application. with that design, most of the app's logic is obvious from the object's structure (model), unlike RPC with which you would usually have to explicitly add a lot more logic.

designing RESTful application is usually a lot harder because it requires you to describe complicated things in a simple manner. describing all functionalities using only CRUD functions is tricky, but after doing that your life would be a lot simpler and you will find that you write a lot shorter methods.

One more restraint REST architecture present is not to use a session context when communicating with client (stateless), meaning all the information needed to understand who is the client and what he wants is passed with the web message. each call to a function is self descriptive, there is no previous conversation with the client which can be referenced in the message. Therefor a client could not tell you "give me the next page" since you don't have a session to store what is the previous page and what kind of page you want, the client would have to say "my name is Yuval, get me page 2 of a specific post in a specific forum". This means a bit more data would have to transfer in the communication, but think of the difference between finding a bug reported from the "get me the next page" function in oppose to "get me page 2 of question id 2190836 in stack overflow".

Of course there is a lot more to it, but to my humble opinion these are the main concepts in a teaspoon.

HTTP is an application protocol. REST is a set of rules, that when followed, enable you to build a distributed application that has a specific set of desirable constraints.

If you are looking for the most significant constraints of REST that distinguish a RESTful application from just any HTTP application, I would say the "self-description" constraint and the hypermedia constraint (aka Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State (HATEOAS)) are the most important.

The self-description constraint requires a RESTful request to be completely self descriptive in the users intent. This allows intermediaries (proxies and caches) to act on the message safely.

The HATEOAS constraint is about turning your application into a web of links where the client's current state is based on its place in that web. It is a tricky concept and requires more time to explain than I have right now.