What does "REST" stand for in web services?

The term "REST" stands for Representational State Transfer. It is an architectural style that is commonly used in designing networked applications, particularly in web services. RESTful web services use HTTP requests to perform operations on resources, which are identified by URLs. The term "Representational" refers to the fact that resources can be represented in multiple formats, such as JSON, XML, or HTML. "State Transfer" indicates that the state of an application is transferred between the client and the server through these representations, allowing for stateless interactions.

This architecture promotes scalability, simplicity, and performance, making it a popular choice for developing APIs in modern applications. The focus on resources and their representations helps to create a more intuitive interaction model, allowing developers to easily build client-server applications.