Representational State Transfer (REST) is a software architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems like the world wide web. The term originated in a 2000 doctoral dissertation about the web written by Roy Fielding, one of the principal authors of the HTTP protocol specification, and has quickly passed into widespread use in the networking community.

This wiki is dedicated to the understanding, the evangelism, and the advancement of the REST architectural style. Here you will find descriptions of REST, records of the experiences of REST proponents, and resources to help you apply REST principles to your software or framework.

Upcoming.org's open API currently supports a RESTful interface, that essentially means you can send an HTTP GET or POST to call exposed methods, and you'll get back an XML document in return.

What exactly is REST (or REST-ful) API and what is the history behind it? Where did it originate? All I can figure out is that it is just URLs that usually return XML in some particular format like RSS or something. Is this all there is to know about it?

The eBay REST API enables developers to interact with the eBay API using a simple URL over HTTP; results are returned in XML format as usual.

REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer. It is the name given to the architectural style of the Web by Roy Fielding.