dPrincipled Design of the Modern Web Architecture

Abstract. The World Wide Web has succeeded in large part because its software architecture has been designed to meet the needs of an Internet-scale distributed hypermedia system. The modern Web architecture empha-sizes scalability of component interactions, generality of interfaces, inde-pendent deployment of components, and intermediary components to reduce interaction latency, enforce security, and encapsulate legacy systems. In this paper, we introduce the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style, developed as an abstract model of the Web architecture to guide our redesign and definition of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). We describe the software engineering principles guiding REST, the interaction techniques chosen to retain those principles, and how the chosen techniques compare to those of other archi-tectural styles. We then compare this idealized style to the currently deployed Web architecture in order to elicit mismatches with the existing protocols. Finally, we discuss the lessons learned from using an interaction style to guide the design of a distributed architecture