From the course: Learning REST APIs
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Resource
- [Instructor] Let's dig a little deeper and look at what is meant by two key terms. Resource and representation. We'll start with resource. The concept of REST was defined by Roy Fielding in a doctoral dissertation in 2000 called Architectural Styles and the Design of Network Based Software Architectures. In this document, we find a pretty clear description of what a resource is. He says, the key abstraction of information in REST is a resource. Any information that can be named can be a resource: a document or image, a temporal service, like today's weather in Los Angeles, a collection of other resources, a non-virtual object like a person, and so on. In other words, any concept that might be the target of an author's hypertext reference, must fit within the definition of a resource. A resource is a conceptual mapping to a set of entities, not the entity that corresponds to the mapping at any particular point in time. The key here is that last part. Conceptual mapping. Consider our…
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