About RESTful Web Services
Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. A service is described as RESTful when it conforms to the tenets of REST.
A RESTful service has the following characteristics:
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Data is modeled as a set of resources. Resources are identified by URIs.
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A small, uniform set of operations are used to manipulate resources (for example, GET, POST, PUT, DELETE).
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A resource can have multiple representations (for example, a blog might have an HTML representation and a RSS representation).
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Services are stateless and because it is likely that the client will want to access related resources, these should be identified in the representation returned, typically by providing hypertext links.
Parent topic: The REST Pages