REST, or Representational State Transfer, describes a series of architectural constraints that exemplify how the web's design emerged.
In Chapter 5 of his thesis, Roy Fielding documents how the World Wide Web is designed to be constrained by the REST series of limitations.
[1][2] The Resource Oriented Architecture, as documented by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby in their 2007 book RESTful Web Services,[3] gives concrete advice on specific technical details.
The power of the web seems to mostly reside in its ability to lower the barriers to entry for human users who may not be highly trained in using computing machinery.
[dubious – discuss] As such, the web widens the market reach for any business that decides to publish some of its content in electronic format.