Representational State Transfer (REST) is a software architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems like the world wide web. The best way to explain this, is an example. A REST application might define the following resources:

• http://example.com/users/
• http://example.com/users/{user} (one for each user)
• http://example.com/findUserForm
• http://example.com/locations/
• http://example.com/locations/{location} (one for each location)
• http://example.com/findLocationForm

This is a very, very short explanation of only a small part of what REST does. More information, as always, can be found on Wikipedia.

When you use custom URLs, you effectively hide some of your internal structure behind more meaningful URLs. This means you can refactor more easily without breaking external links or bookmarks to a specific part of your site. This is also important for search engine optimization.

Resources: