What does REST mean in real world? [duplicate]

This question already has answers here: 开发者_如何学运维 Closed 11 years ago.

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What am I not understanding about REST?

I am really confused about REST.What does REST mean in real world? What does it mean being a RESTful api? If I write some code in PHP,is it by default RESTful? Please explain with some examples.

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Wikipedia has a page on it: Representational State Transfer.

From a practical standpoint, it's a way of building a web service by taking advantage of the features of HTTP itself, rather than building a layer on top of HTTP (as SOAP does).

Code written in PHP (or any other language) isn't inherently RESTful. It's a characteristic of how you design your program, not what language you write it in.