We mentioned earlier that a resource is an abstraction of information. It has a state, which is described through its representation, which can have different formats, such as XML, HTML, and JSON. Nowadays, JSON is the most popular format of a resource's representation.

In REST, the manipulation of a resource is through sending a representation back to the server using standard HTTP methods. The most common methods are GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE. We will discuss them in detail later.