Representational state transfer or REST is an architectural pattern for web services. In this architecture, business objects on the server are represented as web resources. Client act on these web resources using the HTTP verbs such as, GET, POST, PATCH, PUT, and DELETE.

For example, consider a RESTful web service for parts that exposes a web resource /Parts. To get a list of parts, the clients of this web service send an HTTP GET request to /Parts. To create a part, the clients send a POST request to /Parts and specify a payload of the attribute values that are required to create the part.