Roy Fielding is an American computer scientist born in 1965. He is one of the authors of the HTTP protocol and the co-authors of the Apache Web server. In the year 2000, Fielding coined the term REST (short for REpresentational State Transfer) in his doctoral dissertation entitled Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architecture. REST is an architectural style for designing distributed systems. It’s not a standard, but rather a set of constraints. REST is commonly used in conjunction with HTTP. On the one hand, the implementations which follows the strict principles of REST are often referred as RESTful. On the other hand, those which follow a loose adherence of such principles are called RESTlike.