Overview#

Representational State Transfer or REST is an Software Architecture Model that sets certain constraints for designing and building large-scale distributed hypermedia systems. Representational State Transfer is often, improperly, used only as a API transport over HTTPAs an architectural style, Representational State Transfer has very broad application. The designs of both HTTP 1.1 and also URIs follow RESTful principles.

The World Wide Web is no doubt the largest and best known REST application. Many other web services also follow the REST architectural style. Examples include OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect 1.0.

Representational State Transfer objects are defined as addressable URIs, and are typically interacted with using the built-in verbs or HTTP Method — specifically, GET, PUT, DELETE, POST, etc. Representational State Transfer was defined by Roy Fielding in his 2000 PhD dissertation "Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures" [2]

Representational State Transfer Data Elements#

Representational State Transfer is stateless#

All REST interactions are stateless. That is, each request contains all of the information necessary for a connector to understand the request, independent of any requests that may have preceded it. This restriction accomplishes four functions:

• it removes any need for the connectors to retain application state between requests, thus reducing consumption of physical resources and improving scalability;
• it allows interactions to be processed in parallel without requiring that the processing mechanism understand the interaction semantics;
• it allows an intermediary to view and understand a request in isolation, which may be necessary when services are dynamically rearranged; and,
• it forces all of the information that might factor into the reusability of a cached response to be present in each request.

REST APIs MUST be hypertext-driven [3]#

API designers, please note the following rules before calling your creation a REST API:

• A REST API should NOT be dependent on any single communication protocol, though its successful mapping to a given protocol may be dependent on the availability of metadata, choice of methods, etc. In general, any protocol element that uses a URI for identification must allow any URI scheme to be used for the sake of that identification. Failure here implies that identification is not separated from interaction.
• A REST API should NOT contain any changes to the communication protocols aside from filling-out or fixing the details of underspecified bits of standard protocols, such as HTTP PATCH method or Link header field. Workarounds for broken implementations (such as those browsers stupid enough to believe that HTML defines HTTP’s method set) should be defined separately, or at least in appendices, with an expectation that the workaround will eventually be obsolete. Failure here implies that the resource interfaces are object-specific, not generic.
• A REST API SHOULD spend almost all of its descriptive effort in defining the media type(s) used for representing resources and driving application state, or in defining extended relation names and/or hypertext-enabled mark-up for existing standard media types. Any effort spent describing what methods to use on what URIs of interest should be entirely defined within the scope of the processing rules for a media type (and, in most cases, already defined by existing media types). Failure here implies that out-of-band information is driving interaction instead of hypertext.]
• A REST API MUST NOT define fixed resource names or hierarchies (an obvious coupling of client and server). Servers must have the freedom to control their own namespace. Instead, allow servers to instruct clients on how to construct appropriate URIs, such as is done in HTML forms and URI templates, by defining those instructions within media types and link relations. Failure here implies that clients are assuming a resource structure due to out-of band information, such as a domain-specific standard, which is the data-oriented equivalent to RPC’s functional coupling.
• A REST API MUST NOT have "typed" resources that are significant to the client. Specification authors may use resource types for describing server implementation behind the interface, but those types MUST be irrelevant and invisible to the client. The only types that are significant to a client are the current representations media type and standardized relation names.
• A REST API should be entered with no prior knowledge beyond the initial URI (bookmark) and set of standardized media types that are appropriate for the intended audience (i.e., expected to be understood by any client that might use the API). From that point on, all application state transitions must be driven by client selection of server-provided choices that are present in the received representations or implied by the user’s manipulation of those representations. The transitions may be determined (or limited by) the client’s knowledge of media types and resource communication mechanisms, both of which may be improved on-the-fly (e.g., code-on-demand). (Failure here implies that out-of-band information is driving interaction instead of hypertext.)!! Representational State Transfer Limitations[1]

In Representational State Transfer, Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State (HATEOAS) is an architecture constraint in which the client interacts with hypermedia links, rather than through a specific interface. With REST, the core concept is that everything is a resource. While REST was a great solution when it was first proposed, there are some pretty significant issues that the architecture suffers from.

REST’s defining feature is the ability to reference resources — the problem is when those resources are complicated and relational in a more complex organization known as a graph. Fetching these complicated graphs may require multiple round-trips between the client and server.

What this ultimately results in is a system where the more useful it is, the slower it is. In other words, as more relational data is presented, the REST system chokes on itself.

GraphQL#

More Information#

There might be more information for this subject on one of the following:

• Cookie
• OAuth Scope Example
• REST
• RESTful

---

• [#1] - http://nordicapis.com/is-graphql-the-end-of-rest-style-apis/ - based on information obtained 2017-03-12-
• [#2] - Representational State Transfer (REST) - based on information obtained 2017-03-12-
• [#3] - REST APIs must be hypertext-driven