Representational state transfer, or REST, is an architectural pattern for web services. Business objects on the server are referred to as web resources. Clients act on these web resources using the HTTP verbs such as, GET, POST, PATCH, PUT, and DELETE.

Consider a RESTful web service for configurations that exposes a web resource /Configurations. To get a list of configurations, clients send an HTTP GET request to /Configurations. To create a configuration, clients send a POST request to /Configurations and specify a payload of the attribute values required to create these configurations.