RESTful web services are loosely coupled, lightweight web services that are particularly well suited for creating APIs for clients spread out across the internet. REpresentational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style of client-server application centered around the transfer of representations of resources through requests and responses.

In the REST architectural style, data and functionality are considered resources and are accessed using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), typically links on the Web. The resources are represented by documents and are acted upon by using a set of simple, well-defined operations.