REST stands for “representational state transfer,” For the last few years, whenever somebody wants to start building an HTTP API, they pretty much exclusively use REST as the go-to architectural style, over alternative approaches such as XML-RPC, SOAP and JSON-RPC. In this article, Phil Sturgeon discusses two approaches in the context of building HTTP APIs. RPC and REST can both be used via other transportation protocols, such as AMQP, but that is another topic entirely.