Roy T. Fielding: Understanding the REST Style

C O M P U T E R 0 0 1 8 9 1 6 2 / 1 5 / $ 3 1 . 0 0 © 2 0 1 5 I E E E P U B L I S H E D B Y T H E I E E E C O M P U T E R S O C I E T Y J U N E 2 0 1 5 7 Scratch the surface of most modern networked applications, and you’ll see the various application parts exchanging data using an approach called Representational State Transfer (REST). Developers can learn about the origins of REST by reading Roy T. Fielding’s PhD thesis for the University of California, Irvine (UCI), published in 2000 (www.ics.uci.edu /~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm). This is required reading for those wanting to be REST experts. I spoke with Roy about how the REST concepts were developed and how they came to be described in his thesis. You can see the entire interview with Roy at www.computer.org /computingconversations. Roy was an early participant in Web protocol and software development as it emerged in the early 1990s. The first implementations of Web browsers and servers were created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN using a NeXt computer, and they were quickly ported to many different computers and operating systems. For each new use of the Web, ideas about how its protocol could be improved to better support the new idea often followed. To change the protocol, you had to send an email to a list that included virtually all of the Web developers in the world: