REST stands for representational state transfer, it is an architectural style consisting of a coordinated set of components, connectors, and data elements within a distributed hypermedia system.
The focus in this system is on common roles and a specific set of interactions between data elements rather than implementation details.
REST is basically the underlying architectural principle of the web and an application programming interface (API) that adheres to the principles of REST does not require the client to know anything about the structure of the API.
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Instead, the server needs to provide whatever information the client needs to interact with the service.
REST is a lightweight version of mechanism like Remote Procedure Calls, and web services like SOAP, and WSDL.
Although it is not a standard, REST is fully featured and most things that a user wants to do with web services can be done with a RESTful architecture.
RESTful programming is about resources being identified in a persistent identifier.
