Read all about it over here:
http://internet.conveyor.com/RESTwiki/moin.cgi
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/02/06/rest.html
http://internet.conveyor.com/RESTwiki/moin.cgi/RestFaqThis is what Roy Fielding, REST's coiner, says
The World Wide Web architecture has evolved into a novel architectural style that I call "representational state transfer." Using elements of the client/server, pipe-and-filter, and distributed objects paradigms, this style optimizes the network transfer of representations of a resource. A Web-based application can be viewed as a dynamic graph of state representations (pages) and the potential transitions (links) between states. The result is an architecture that separates server implementation from the client's perception of resources, scales well with large numbers of clients, enables transfer of data in streams of unlimited size and type, supports intermediaries (proxies and gateways) as data transformation and caching components, and concentrates the application state within the user agent components.
FWIW, this wiki is being adjusted according to the REST philosophy. Each page in this wiki now has one "official" way of being identified, i.e. this one is:
http://mini.net/tcl/3513
No ".html" at the end, preferably. Two other valuable access paths are "tolerated" (both redirect to the above one):
http://wiki.tcl.tk/3513 <== preferred for public use, e.g. comp.lang.tcl
http://purl.org/tcl/wiki/3513 <== fallback, in case anything breaksOther ways to reach this wiki are obsolete, including everything with "cgi-bin" in it.
-jcw
KBK (21 October 2002) - Please tell me that accessing pages by full title, e.g.,
http://wiki.tcl.tk/REpresentational%20State%20Transfer%2c%20REST
is still acceptable?
Pertinent references: