History of Representational State Transfer
Roy Fielding coined the term Representational State Transfer (REST) in his 2000 doctoral thesis Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures. In essence, he argues an API should use the existing HTTP verbs, and it should focus on representations of business objects rather than backend implementations. An example might be to model a Customer object the way the business knows and interacts with it rather than how it’s stored on the customer database table. In this post I’ll describe how to design an effective REST API using some of the concepts Fielding pioneered.