Chapter 03: The Principles of REST by Roy Fielding

As you already know from the historical context, Roy Thomas Fielding had been working on the architecture of distributed systems since 1993. He later formalized his findings in his doctoral dissertation, which he defended in 2000. In the chapter titled Representational State Transfer, now widely known by the acronym REST, he defined six architectural constraints. It’s important to understand that REST was designed for general distributed environments and applies to the entire web, not just web APIs. In fact, web APIs as we know them today barely existed when REST was first introduced.