The development of web technology and the origin of REST

PS: This article is excerpted from " Understanding the True REST Architecture Style ", I personally think that this article is very well understood

The development of web technology and the origin of REST

The Web (short for World Wide Web) is an all-encompassing kaleidoscope, and different people, looking at it from different angles, will come to very different views on what the Web is. As web developers, we need to understand the web technically. From the perspective of technical architecture, the technical architecture of the Web includes four cornerstones:

• HATE
• HTTP
• HyperText (in addition to HTML, can also be XML or JSON with hyperlinks)
• The four cornerstones of MIME
  support each other, and promote the development of the magnificent edifice of the Web at the speed of geometric progression. Based on these four cornerstones, the development of web development technology can be roughly divided into the following stages:
  
  1. Static content stage: In this initial stage, the Web is mainly used by some research institutions. The Web consists of a large number of static HTML documents, most of which are academic papers. A web server can be thought of as a shared file server that supports hypertext.
  2. CGI program stage: In this stage, the Web server adds some programming APIs. Applications written through these APIs can provide some dynamically changing content to clients. The communication between the Web server and the application is completed through the CGI (Common Gateway Interface) protocol, and the application is called a CGI program.
  3. Scripting language stage: At this stage, scripting language technologies such as ASP, PHP, JSP, and ColdFusion that support sessions appear on the server side, and technologies such as Java Applet and JavaScript appear on the browser side. Using these techniques, richer dynamic content can be provided.
  4. Thin client application phase: In this phase, an application server independent of the web server appears on the server side. At the same time, the Web MVC development model appeared, and various Web MVC development frameworks became popular and dominated. Web applications developed based on these frameworks are usually thin client applications because they generate all dynamic content on the server side.
  5. RIA application stage: In this stage, a variety of RIA (Rich Internet Application) technologies appear, which greatly improves the user experience of Web applications. The most widely used RIA technology is DHTML+Ajax. Ajax technology supports dynamic update of partial content in the page without refreshing the page. At the same time, a large number of Web front-end DHTML development libraries were born, such as Prototype, Dojo, ExtJS, jQuery/jQuery UI, etc. Many development libraries support the development of Single Page Application. Other RIA technologies include Adobe's Flex, Microsoft's Silverlight, Sun's JavaFX (now owned by Oracle), and more.
  6. Mobile Web Application Stage: In this stage, a large number of Web application development technologies for mobile devices have emerged. In addition to the development technologies native to operating system platforms such as Android, iOS, and Windows Phone, HTML5-based development technologies have also become very popular.
     From the development process of the above-mentioned Web development technology, the Web has gradually become more and more dynamic from the stage originally conceived by its designers to support static documents. The interactive mode of web applications has become more and more complex: from static documents to content-based portals, e-commerce sites, search engines, social networking sites, to entertainment-based massively multiplayer online games, mobile phones game.