REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer. It is the name given to the architectural style of the Web by RoyFielding.    (1T5)

In a nutshell, REST defines identifiable resources, and methods for accessing and manipulating the state of those resources. As implemented on the World Wide Web, URIs identify the resources, and HTTP is the protocol by which resources are accessed. REST argues that HTTP itself --- its minimal method set and semantics, and the ability to extend this method set as required --- is sufficiently general to model any application domain; i.e., traditional OOP modeling of application objects with type-specific interfaces is unnecessary and replaced by modeling things as hierarchical families of abstract resources with a common interface and semantics defined by HTTP itself.    (1T6)

The style shares similarities with many other architectures, but if you had to choose one that it most closely resembled, that would probably be TupleSpaces. Not to suggest that the Web is a tuple space, since tuple spaces were typically used as a blackboard architecture, and the semantics of their methods weren't defined as narrowly as is done in HTTP. But they both share some important features, the most important being InterfaceGenericity. It's also important to note a key difference between TupleSpaces and REST; that a tuple space has a single fixed interface, whereas REST suggests that an extensible interface is a good tradeoff, so long as the method extensions remain generic (i.e. are applicable to all resources).    (1T7)

REST is also conceptually close to the Unix style and its more-consistent implementation in the Unix successors Plan 9 and Inferno. It shares an emphasis on building systems by modeling application domains and services as resources organized in a hierarchical namespace and accessed through generic interfaces. JeffBone has a rant-in-progress which might be helpful in understanding this here: ResourceModelingAndNames.    (1T8)

I wonder WhereRestStopsAndHttpStarts?    (1T9)

(And why can other folks edit this?) [because we love it that way][way!] ... [pouet]    (1TA)