What is REST? Slightly confused [closed]

I was under the assumption that REST was a web service but it seems that I am incorrect in thinking this - so, what is REST?

I've read through Wikipedia but still cant quite wrap my head around it. Why to do many places refer to API's as REST API's?

REST is not a specific web service but a design concept (architecture) for managing state information. The seminal paper on this was Roy Thomas Fielding's dissertation (2000), "Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures" (available online from the University of California, Irvine).

First read Ryan Tomayko's post How I explained REST to my wife; it's a great starting point. Then read Fielding's actual dissertation. It's not that advanced, nor is it long (six chapters, 180 pages)! (I know you kids in school like it short).

EDIT: I feel it's pointless to try to explain REST. It has so many concepts like scalability, visibility (stateless) etc. that the reader needs to grasp, and the best source for understanding those are the actual dissertation. It's much more than POST/GET etc.

REST is a software design pattern typically used for web applications. In layman's terms this means that it is a commonly used idea used in many different projects. It stands for REpresentational State Transfer. The basic idea of REST is treating objects on the server-side (as in rows in a database table) as resources than can be created or destroyed.

The most basic way of thinking about REST is as a way of formatting the URLs of your web applications. For example, if your resource was called "posts", then:

/posts Would be how a user would access ALL the posts, for displaying.

/posts/:id Would be how a user would access and view an individual post, retrieved based on their unique id.

/posts/new Would be how you would display a form for creating a new post.

Sending a POST request to /users would be how you would actually create a new post on the database level.

Sending a PUT request to /users/:id would be how you would update the attributes of a given post, again identified by a unique id.

Sending a DELETE request to /users/:id would be how you would delete a given post, again identified by a unique id.

As I understand it, the REST pattern was mainly popularized (for web apps) by the Ruby on Rails framework, which puts a big emphasis on RESTful routes. I could be wrong about that though.

I may not be the most qualified to talk about it, but this is how I've learned it (specifically for Rails development).

When someone refers to a "REST api," generally what they mean is an api that uses RESTful urls for retrieving data.

REST is an architectural style and a design for network-based software architectures.

REST concepts are referred to as resources. A representation of a resource must be stateless. It is represented via some media type. Some examples of media types include XML, JSON, and RDF. Resources are manipulated by components. Components request and manipulate resources via a standard uniform interface. In the case of HTTP, this interface consists of standard HTTP ops e.g. GET, PUT, POST, DELETE.

REST is typically used over HTTP, primarily due to the simplicity of HTTP and its very natural mapping to RESTful principles. REST however is not tied to any specific protocol.

Fundamental REST Principles

Client-Server Communication

Client-server architectures have a very distinct separation of concerns. All applications built in the RESTful style must also be client-server in principle.

Stateless

Each client request to the server requires that its state be fully represented. The server must be able to completely understand the client request without using any server context or server session state. It follows that all state must be kept on the client. We will discuss stateless representation in more detail later.

Cacheable

Cache constraints may be used, thus enabling response data to to be marked as cacheable or not-cachable. Any data marked as cacheable may be reused as the response to the same subsequent request.

Uniform Interface

All components must interact through a single uniform interface. Because all component interaction occurs via this interface, interaction with different services is very simple. The interface is the same! This also means that implementation changes can be made in isolation. Such changes, will not affect fundamental component interaction because the uniform interface is always unchanged. One disadvantage is that you are stuck with the interface. If an optimization could be provided to a specific service by changing the interface, you are out of luck as REST prohibits this. On the bright side, however, REST is optimized for the web, hence incredible popularity of REST over HTTP!

The above concepts represent defining characteristics of REST and differentiate the REST architecture from other architectures like web services. It is useful to note that a REST service is a web service, but a web service is not necessarily a REST service.

See this blog post on REST Design Principals for more details on REST and the above principles.