REST stands for Representational State Transfer.
Here is a short summary of the REST principles:
- Uniform Interface: Every rest architecture must have a standardized way of accessing and processing data resources. This includes unique resource identifiers (i.e., unique URLs) and self-descriptive messages in the server response that describe how to process the representation (for instance JSON vs XML) of the data resource.
- Stateless: Every client request is self-contained in that the server doesn’t need to store any application data in order to respond to subsequent requests.
- Client-Server: There must be both a client and server in the architecture.
- Cacheable & Layered System: Caching and layering increases networking efficiency.
Why RESTful are stateless?
It might appear easier to design a server that isn’t stateless. There is a reason why RESTful web servers are not allowed to remember anything about the previous requests that the user has sent. In short, stateless servers make your applications scalable.