.. _rest_overview:

Overview of REST
================

REST is an acronym for "REpresentational State Transfer".  The basic idea of 
REST is to rely on a fixed set of operations on named resources, where the 
representation of each resource is the same for retrieving and setting 
information. In other words, if you retrieve data in an XML format, you can send
data back to the server in the same XML format to set it. 

Operations on resources are implemented with the standard primitives of HTTP: 
GET, DELETE, PUT, POST, HEAD, etc. Each resource is represented as a standard 
URI.

For more information about REST visit the `wikedia page <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer>`_.