eugeniop

_REST_, or Representational State Transfer is probably one of the most misunderstood terms in Web API development today. Where REST is misunderstood is that most people use REST as synonymous with anything that is easy to access over HTTP and forget about the constraints completely. 

The term's roots are from Roy Fielding's previously mentioned dissertation on network based architecture (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm). In it, Roy describes REST as an architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems. What he is saying is that REST is not a technology, it is not a framework, and it is not a design pattern. It is a style. There is no "One True Way" to do REST and as a result, many flavours of RESTful systems. What they have in common however, and  most importantly, is that RESTful systems manifest iteself in a set of constraints: X, Y, Z.

The other part of the misunderstanding is that you MUST build a RESTful system. This is also not the case. The RESTful constrai