Decoding REST: Architectural Style for Seamless Web Communication

Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style for designing networked applications. It is commonly used in web development to create APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that allow communication between different software systems.

REST is characterized by its stateless nature, meaning that each request from a client to a server must contain all the information needed to understand and process the request. The communication between client and server is achieved using standard HTTP methods, such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE.

REST APIs are designed around resources, which are identified by unique URLs. These resources can be manipulated using the corresponding HTTP methods. Data can be exchanged in various formats, most commonly JSON or XML, allowing different systems to communicate seamlessly over the internet.