REST, Restful

How I explained REST to my wife...

We need to be able to talk to all machines about all the stuff that's on all the other machines. So we need some way of having one machine tell another machine about a resource that might be on yet another machine.

Wife: Sounds like GET is a pretty important verb.

Ryan: It is. Especially when you're using a web browser because browsers pretty much just get stuff. They don't do a lot of other types of interaction with resources. This is a problem because it has led many people to assume that HTTP is just for getting. But HTTP is actually a general purpose protocol for applying verbs to nouns.

Wife: Why can't a machine understand a normal web page? (link works only in IE)

Ryan: Because web pages are designed to be understood by people. A machine doesn't care about layout and styling. Machines basically just need the data. Ideally, every URL would have a human readable and a machine readable representation. When a machine GETs the resource, it will ask for the machine readable one. When a browser GETs a resource for a human, it will ask for the human readable one.

Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web

20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.