How does REST move data?

HOW IT WORKS

A resource-oriented style of using HTTP where each request carries enough context to stand alone and receives one discrete response.

Public and CRUD APIs stay cacheable, debuggable, and interoperable across every language, CDN, and browser. Clients address resources with URLs and verbs (GET/POST/PUT/PATCH/DELETE). Status codes, Cache-Control, and ETag drive caching and retries. HTTP/1.1 keep-alive or HTTP/2 usually reuses the TCP/TLS session across many short-lived exchanges.

REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE

GET /users → 200 OK + JSON

A dashboard loads the signed-in org’s user list over HTTPS with a bearer token. Client → Server → Client · Short-lived request; TCP/TLS often reused

GET /users HTTP/1.1
Host: api.example.com
Authorization: Bearer eyJ...
Accept: application/json
If-None-Match: "u-42"

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json
ETag: "u-43"
Cache-Control: private, max-age=30

{"users":[{"id":7,"name":"Ada"}]}

BROWSER SUPPORT

fetch / XMLHttpRequest — universal

Use fetch or XHR with JSON bodies. Conditional GETs via If-None-Match/If-Modified-Since; CORS and credentialed requests must be configured explicitly.

INFRASTRUCTURE

CDN edge cache, reverse proxies, TLS termination

Terminate TLS at the edge, cache safe GETs with Cache-Control/ETag, and put rate limits + WAF in front. Prefer HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 to the origin for connection reuse.