High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Representational state transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term Representational State Transfer (REST) was introduced and defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding in his doctoral dissertation. Fielding is one of the principal authors of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) specification versions 1.0 and 1.1. Conforming to the REST constraints is often referred to as being ?RESTful?.