<P> Representational state transfer (REST) or RESTful web services is a way of providing interoperability between computer systems on the Internet . REST - compliant Web services allow requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of Web resources using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations . Other forms of Web services exist, which expose their own arbitrary sets of operations such as WSDL and SOAP . </P> <P> "Web resources" were first defined on the World Wide Web as documents or files identified by their URLs, but today they have a much more generic and abstract definition encompassing every thing or entity that can be identified, named, addressed or handled, in any way whatsoever, on the Web . In a RESTful Web service, requests made to a resource's URI will elicit a response that may be in XML, HTML, JSON or some other defined format . The response may confirm that some alteration has been made to the stored resource, and it may provide hypertext links to other related resources or collections of resources . Using HTTP, as is most common, the kind of operations available include those predefined by the HTTP methods GET, POST, PUT, DELETE and so on . </P>

What is the meaning of representational state transfer