Even in the 1990s, the computers and internet technology kept advancing rapidly and the web browsers kept evolving simultaneously. This meant that the web servers themselves could start offloading some of the work to the web client; that is, the web browser. Slowly this began to lead developers to experiment with different software architectures for developing web applications. By 2010, the REST protocol became the most prevalent way to design a modern web application.

REST (Representation State Transfer Protocol) was first described by Roy Fielding in his seminal paper titled, Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures (https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/fielding_dissertation.pdf). This way of designing a web application has many advantages. It is practical, efficient in CPU usage and network load, scales better for increasing internet traffic, and so on. The following are some of the properties and benefits of using REST software architecture.