RESTful Web Services The document introduces REST (REpresentational State Transfer), an architectural style for building distributed systems based on HTTP. It discusses the principles of REST including addressable resources, a uniform interface, representation-oriented communication, statelessness, and hypermedia as the engine of application state (HATEOAS). It also outlines how to design RESTful services by defining an object model, distributed interface, URIs, data formats, and allowed HTTP methods.