Roy Thomas Fielding is an American computer scientist who completed his PhD at the University of California, Irvine, in 2000. His doctoral dissertation, “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures,” is hosted on his own site at roy.gbiv.com and lays out a framework for reasoning about the architecture of distributed software systems.
Chapter 5 of that dissertation, titled “Representational State Transfer (REST),” introduces and names the REST architectural style. In Fielding’s words, the chapter describes “the software engineering principles guiding REST and the interaction constraints chosen to retain those principles.” REST became the dominant style for designing networked application interfaces built on the Web.
Fielding’s work on REST grew directly out of his deep involvement in the technical standards of the Web. He was a principal author of the HTTP/1.1 specification, and he developed REST in part to explain and justify the design decisions behind HTTP and the Web’s architecture.
He is also one of the original developers of the Apache HTTP Server and a co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation, placing him at the center of both the practice and the theory of how the Web is built.