http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer said
REpresentational State Transfer (REST) is an architecture style software for distributed systems such as the World Wide Web. REST has become the predominant web service design model.
A RESTful web service (also called a RESTful web interface) is a web service implemented using HTTP and REST principles . This is a set of resources with four specific aspects:
- Base URI for a web service such as http://example.com/resources/
- The type of Internet storage medium supported by the web service. This is often XML, but can be any other valid type of Internet media that is a valid hypertext standard.
- The set of operations supported by the web service using HTTP (for example, GET, PUT, POST, or DELETE).
- The API must be hypertext driven.
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