What does “state transfer” in Representational State Transfer (REST) refer to?

Question

What does the State Transfer in Representational State Transfer refer to?

Found some explanations about this (e.g. here) but I still don\'t understa

Answer 1

Consider a client application to be a kind of giant state machine. The client's initial state is equal to the first representation returned from the server. Links in the returned representation provide possible "state transitions".

One thing to note is that there are a two major types of links, passive and active. Passive links like and do not actually cause a state transition, they simply augment the current state. Links like

and however are active links and the cause a state transition. After following one of these links the new client state is equal to the returned representation, aka state transfer.

If you are used to building traditional desktop client applications you will find this is a radically different architecture. Not one that you are likely to grok overnight. Initially this approach may seem very limiting but when you consider that a client application can be the host to many simultaneously executing state machines you will start to realize that you can do just about anything that you could using a remote object architecture and still maintain the loose coupling of web browser.