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Representation of a resource state that get transferred between a client and server.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-restful/

REST Web service follows four basic design principles:
1. Use HTTP methods explicitly.
2. Be stateless.
3. Expose directory structure-like URIs.
4. Transfer XML, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), or both

// Use Http methods
This basic REST design principle establishes a one-to-one mapping between create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations and HTTP methods. According to this mapping:
To create a resource on the server, use POST.
To retrieve a resource, use GET.
To change the state of a resource or to update it, use PUT.
To remove or delete a resource, use DELETE.

// why Stateless?
REST Web services need to scale to meet increasingly high performance demands. Clusters of servers with load-balancing and failover capabilities, proxies, and gateways are typically arranged in a way that forms a service topology, which allows requests to be forwarded from one server to the other as needed to decrease the overall response time of a Web service call. Using intermediary servers to improve scale requires REST Web service clients to send complete, independent requests; that is, to send requests that include all data needed to be fulfilled so that the components in the intermediary servers may forward, route, and load-balance without any state being held locally in between requests.
A complete, independent request doesn't require the server, while processing the request, to retrieve any kind of application context or state. A REST Web service application (or client) includes within the HTTP headers and body of a request all of the parameters, context, and data needed by the server-side component to generate a response. Statelessness in this sense improves Web service performance and simplifies the design and implementation of server-side components because the absence of state on the server removes the need to synchronize session data with an external application

In a RESTful Web service, the server is responsible for generating responses and for providing an interface that enables the client to maintain application state on its own. For example, in the request for a multipage result set, the client should include the actual page number to retrieve instead of simply asking for next