Anyone who could run a REST framework, could run the REST protocol.

6 contraints:

1. The architecture of the server-to-client maintains UI separation from databases/processing.

2 Statelessness - the server doesn't store anything from the client, but any call should be repeatable. (Call is the request action a client takes)

3. Cachability - support for cache on the client side.

4. Layered - proxies and load-balancers can exist in-between, and not affect client calls

5. Readily available code

6. Uniform interface (4 properties)

1. resources are requests. URL maps to data.
2. resource data has enough info to modify or delete itself.
3. message contains info on how to process the data, eg: type tags to indicate which parser to use
4. data contains links (urls) that share additional ways to process the data (this property is often broken)

This get request example retrives a json file, which, in unix could be printed pretty as shown: