REST · Representational State Transfer
/ rest /
REST is a popular, tidy style for building web APIs — a set of habits, not a piece of software. The core idea is lovely and simple: treat everything your service offers as a 'resource' that lives at a URL, and use ordinary HTTP verbs to act on it. The URL says what; the verb says do what.
So /users/42 names one user, and the verb decides the action: GET to read them, POST to create one, PUT to update, DELETE to remove. Same address, different verb, different meaning. Once you see the pattern, a well-designed REST API feels like reading nouns and verbs in a sentence — guessable, even before you read the docs.
It's called RESTful when an API follows these conventions. REST isn't a law and people argue endlessly about the fine print, but its plainness is the whole point: no special protocol to learn, just the everyday HTTP the web already speaks.
GET /users/42 → read user 42 POST /users → create a new user PUT /users/42 → update user 42 DELETE /users/42 → remove user 42
One resource, four verbs — the whole REST idea in four lines.
The 'RES…ST' acronym is a mouthful nobody says aloud — almost everyone just calls it 'a REST API'.