What exactly is RESTful programming?

Question

What exactly is RESTful programming?

Answer 1

The point of rest is that if we agree to use a common language for basic operations (the http verbs), the infrastructure can be configured to understand them and optimize them properly, for example, by making use of caching headers to implement caching at all levels.

With a properly implemented restful GET operation, it shouldn't matter if the information comes from your server's DB, your server's memcache, a CDN, a proxy's cache, your browser's cache or your browser's local storage. The fasted, most readily available up to date source can be used.

Saying that Rest is just a syntactic change from using GET requests with an action parameter to using the available http verbs makes it look like it has no benefits and is purely cosmetic. The point is to use a language that can be understood and optimized by every part of the chain. If your GET operation has an action with side effects, you have to skip all HTTP caching or you'll end up with inconsistent results.