In this chapter, we discussed the brief history of HTTP and sessions. Next, we looked at the problems REST protocols were designed to solve and how they came into prominence. Then, we developed a deep understanding of what a REST protocol is, how to design an application based around it, how to build a REST server based on our design, and finally we looked at different ways to interact with a REST server using cURL, Postman, and Go programs. You're free to use whichever you want to interact with a REST server. However, for the remainder of the book, we will see interactions with REST servers using cURL.

Now that we have discussed all the important topics that are fundamental to develop distributed and web-oriented applications. In the next chapter, Chapter 5, Introducing Goophr we can start discussing what a distributed document indexer is on a conceptual level and how to design it, plan for data communication, and so on.