Resource-Oriented Architecture

That’s the Resource-Oriented Architecture. It’s just four concepts:
1. Resources
2. Their names (URIs)
3. Their representations
4. The links between them
and four properties:
1. Addressability
2. Statelessness
3. Connectedness
4. A uniform interface
Of course, there are still a lot of open questions. How should a real data set be split
into resources, and how should the resources be laid out? What should go into the
actual HTTP requests and responses? I’m going to spend much of the rest of the book
exploring issues like these.

from OREILLY RESTful Web Services