Meaning of REST in layman terms

#rest

Hi guys,
I was recently looking into understanding the REST architecture and it's meaning. I believe there are a lot of us who had used REST APIs extensively (consumed them in frontend side or might have possibly even created some on server side) without ever diving into understanding about the foundational architecture on which all those APIs have been based, right ? and that's what got me to write about it here at DEV.

Let's see what is it all about.

REST stands for : "RE"PRESENTATIONAL "S"TATE "T"RANSFER
(I still wonder why they took 2 letters from first word (RE) and only one from other ('S' & 'T') but anyways, pardon the judge in me)

As the full form states above we need to understand meaning of each word individually as components of the architecture to understand it's meaning properly.
Putting it directly in simple words would help save your time, so this is how it is :

"REST means an architecture through which state (properties : member variables/data variables) of complex objects on the server side could be transferred using some generalized formats (most commonly JSON/XML) and thereafter represented (at frontend) as text by the means of pre-defined data types supported commonly by all types of programming languages."

Now, elaborating a little bit about the definition above. It simply means that REST architecture is one through which any of the server side generated complex object's (objects created by any of the server side programming languages) state (properties) can be transferred in any of the generalized formats and thereafter can be represented at the frontend or UI side by the means of simple pre-defined data types like String, int, etc.

That's all !

This being my first post at DEV excites me and worries me a bit at the same time, I hope I was able to help you guys through my posts. Please drop comments below to give me feedback on how can I improve anything in terms of creating useful content for you all ! and also don't forget to like the post if it helped you out by hitting the heart button ! Thanks for reading !