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by Chuck Hinson.
Original Post: Respresentational State
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I was just reading a page on RESTWiki about HowSoapComparesToRest. Despite the title, about half the page is devoted to a discussion of what the State in REpresentational State Transfer is.
Reading through that discussion and seeing people trying to get a handle on what resource's state is transferred when you do a POST to certain kinds of resources or the fact that you might transfer the state of a resource that has no name, I suddenly had the thought that its not so important to know what state is -- its what it's not that's important. In fact, its really not so much about the state at all -- its about the representation. In a RESTful system, (in a very general sense) you dont move objects (resources) around, you move facsimiles (representations) of those objects (resources) around.
Why is this important? I'm not sure I know at this point. I just know that after several years of thinking and reading about REST, this is the first time I've thought about it this way.
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