What exactly is RESTful programming?

Question

What exactly is RESTful programming?

Answer 1

This is amazingly long "discussion" and yet quite confusing to say the least.

IMO:

1) There is no such a thing as restful programing, without a big joint and lots of beer :)

2) Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style specified in the dissertation of Roy Fielding. It has a number of constraints. If your Service/Client respect those then it is RESTful. This is it.

You can summarize(significantly) the constraints to :

• stateless communication
• respect HTTP specs (if HTTP is used)
• clearly communicates the content formats transmitted
• use hypermedia as the engine of application state

There is another very good post which explains things nicely.

A lot of answers copy/pasted valid information mixing it and adding some confusion. People talk here about levels, about RESTFul URIs(there is not such a thing!), apply HTTP methods GET,POST,PUT ... REST is not about that or not only about that.

For example links - it is nice to have a beautifully looking API but at the end the client/server does not really care of the links you get/send it is the content that matters.

In the end any RESTful client should be able to consume to any RESTful service as long as the content format is known.