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Roy Fielding (1965–)

Roy Thomas Fielding is an American computer scientist known for defining REST and for his work on the core standards of the Web.

Life and career

Born in 1965, Fielding earned his PhD from the University of California, Irvine in 2000; his dissertation, “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures,” introduced Representational State Transfer (REST) as an account of the Web’s architecture, and coined HATEOAS. He was a principal author of the HTTP specification and a co-author of the URI generic-syntax RFCs (RFC 2396 and RFC 3986). He co-founded the Apache HTTP Server project and chaired the Apache Software Foundation in its early years. He later worked on Waka, an experimental binary replacement for HTTP, and has been a senior principal scientist at Adobe.

REST

REST — Representational State Transfer — is Fielding’s account of the architectural constraints that explain why the Web scales. Rather than a protocol or a product, it is a set of constraints: a client–server separation, statelessness, cacheability, a uniform interface in which a URI names a resource and a small fixed set of operations acts on it, and HATEOAS (hypermedia as the engine of application state), in which the available next steps are carried in the representations themselves. Fielding derived these constraints by analysing what the existing Web’s protocols already did well, then naming the style that made them work.

Where his work sits

Fielding’s contribution is largely architectural — naming and articulating the constraints (REST) that explain why the Web scales, alongside authorship of the protocols (HTTP) and identifiers (URI) that embody them.

Key works

REST — “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures” (PhD dissertation, 2000)
The HTTP and URI specifications
The Apache HTTP Server