Java Developer Conference 2010

The term REST comes from Roy Fielding's PhD dissertation, published in 2000, and it stands for REpresentational State Transfer. REST by itself is not architecture.
REST is a set of constraints that, when applied to the design of a system, creates a software architectural style.
Fielding ends with the following constraints that define a RESTful system:
• It must be a client-server system
• It has to be stateless—there should be no need for the service to keep users’ sessions; in other words, each request should be independent of others
• It has to support a caching system—the network infrastructure should support cache at different levels
• It has to be uniformly accessible—each resource must have a unique address and a valid point of access
• It has to be layered—it must support scalability
• And others.
These constraints don't dictate what kind of technology to use; they only define how data is transferred between components and what are the benefits of following the guidelines.
Therefore, a RESTful system can be implemented in any networking architecture available.
More important, there is no need for us to invent new technologies or networking protocols: we can use existing networking infrastructures such as the Web to create RESTful architectures. Consequently, a RESTful architecture is one that is maintainable, extendable, and distributed.
In September, 2009, the final release of Sun JAX-RS (JSR-311) provides a high level declarative programming model; with the ability to create Restful Web Services by using this implementation we can achieve Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA).

Speaker: Osama Oransa