Roy Thomas Fielding (born 1965) is an American computer scientist, one of the principal authors of the HTTP specification and the originator of the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style.

[1][2] Fielding works as a senior principal scientist at Adobe Systems in San Jose, California.

He describes himself as "part Maori, Kiwi, Yank, Irish, Scottish, British, and California beach bum".

Computer engineers frequently hold up REST as an approach to developing web services,[8] as an alternative to other distributed-computing specifications such as SOAP.

Fielding co-founded the Apache HTTP Server project[9][10] and was a member of the interim OpenSolaris Boards until he resigned from the community in 2008.