Could you explain what is meant by REST in the context of web services?

REST (Representational State Transfer) is an architectural style for creating web services that uses standard HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to interact with resources. In REST, resources are represented as URLs, and operations on them are performed via HTTP requests. The main principles of REST include:

• Client-server architecture
• Statelessness: each request contains all the necessary information
• Caching
• Uniform interface

For example, to retrieve information about a user with id=1, a GET request is made to /users/1, and to create a new user, a POST request is made to /users with data in the body.