REST history

The term REST was first introduced by Roy Thomas Fielding in Chapter 5 of his PhD thesis, Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures (University of California, Irvine, 2000, http://www.ics.uci. edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm). The dissertation is a retrospective explanation of the architecture chosen to develop the Web. In his thesis, Fielding takes a look at the parts of the World Wide Web that work very well and extracts design principles that could make any other distributed hypermedia system—whether related to the Web or not—as efficient. The original motivation for developing REST was to create an architectural model of the Web. Roy T. Fielding is also one of the authors of the HTTP specification.

Ref : Beginning of JavaEE 7