Representational State Transfer (REST)

The central feature that distinguishes the REST architectural style from other network-based styles is its emphasis on a uniform interface between components … … Implementations are decoupled from the services they provide, which encourages independent evolvability. … … The REST interface is designed to be efficient for large-grain hypermedia data transfer, optimizing for the common case of the [WorldWideWeb]…

– Roy T. Fielding

• Representational State Transfer (REST) at Wikipedia
• What exactly is RESTful programming? at Stack Exchange
• Representational State Transfer (REST) in Architectural Styles and
  the Design of Network-based Software Architectures — Roy T. Fielding