The World Wide Web (also known as WWW) has been the backbone of the information age, connecting distributed systems over networks. It has become an integral part of our day-to-day life; take, for example, reading a newspaper, checking the weather, searching for information via Google, or any other search engine. It is essential to note that all the information used by the systems is dispersed across the networks and transmitted via the WWW. Given the reach of the WWW, have you ever thought what are the architecture or design principles to be considered while developing an application for internet usage? How can you improve the scalability of a web application? With the advent of emerging technologies such as cloud, social media, and the Internet of Things, what considerations must be taken while developing a web application? I believe similar questions may have been in the mind of Roy Thomas Fielding. Roy Thomas Fielding's research on Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-Based Software Architectures (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm) comes up with answers to these questions, with a novel architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems, popularly known as REpresentational State Transfer, abbreviated to REST.

This book familiarizes the reader with the concepts of REST. It serves as a practical guide for developing web applications following the REST architectural style, using Java APIs. This book is organized with plenty of real-life examples each chapter to help the reader gain hands-on experience and boost their confidence in applying what they have learned.