Representational state transfer

• transfer of representations of resources
• HTTP is accidentally RESTful
• use pre-existing, well-defined interface, minimize the addition of new appplication-specific features
• stateless - server stores no client context. server can be stateful
• cacheable

Uniform interface

• identification of resources
• manipulation of resources through these representations
• self-descriptive messages, eg. tells how to parse using MIME
• hypermedia as the enginer of application state