Applied Representational State Transfer

Abstract: With an ever growing amount of information that most activities produce today the tradition has been to use different systems to store and manage the data. Depending on its type, the spreadsheets could be stored with FTP on some file server with an obscure directory structure, and every time that new meeting protocol must be added to the homepage it's added manually, the phone numbers of every employee is written on a long forgotten paper hanging in the corridor, and so forth. Could some sort of an information infrastructure consolidate all data to be easily found, accessed and updated? An infrastructure like that must be able to handle different types of data, it must be based on common technologies for untroubled management from different applications and it must scale well as the data continues to increase. REST or Representation State Transfer is an architecture style as a set of guidelines of how HTTP was originally intended to be used. REST advocates that information should be logically divided into linked resources where each resource is identified by an URI, and where operations on the resources is performed by the methods of HTTP: GET, PUT, POST and DELETE. Content-negotiation is used to deliver different types of representations of the resources to the clients. This makes a system based on REST loosely coupled and interoperable. This thesis aims to get a deeper knowledge of REST and how it can be used in distributed systems.