REST: Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures

This dissertation introduces and elaborates on Representational State Transfer (REST), an architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems. REST defines a set of architectural constraints that aim to improve the performance, scalability, simplicity, modifiability, visibility, portability, and reliability of software architectures. It's a foundational work for understanding how to design networked applications, like APIs, that operate on the principles of stateless communication and resource representation.