Roy fielding came with this idea and a lot of application is built around this. But I am really really confused why it is called Representational state transfer. Don't we go from one page to other page in almost every application and the application changes its state as we move from one page to other page?
After reading a few article I know it 1. is built on HTTP, 2. Allows caching. 3. Resources can be accessed using URI.
What are the advantages of REST over regular ASP.Net web form application? Why and where would I need RESTful application. Please help.
BTW I have been programming ASP.Net web forms for long time and really don't know about new technologies.
Thanks in advance.
Here is the trend I see:
1996 - Classic ASP
2002 - ASP.NET
2009 - ASP.NET MVC
2012 - ASP.NET Web Api and Single-page applications
Perhaps by "RESTful application" you mean a single-page application:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-page_application
This is where the trend is going I believe - instead of creating both UI and business logic on the server side, you can build rich client-side UIs which communicate with the server via REST protocol (thus having only business logic and RESTful endpoint on the server side), allowing you to provide a better use experience to your users. Also you can build multiple UIs for different platforms (Web UI, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows 8 app etc.) which all are consuming the same REST API service.