Which statement about REST design principles is accurate?

Which statement about REST design principles is accurate?

• A. Maintain server-side sessions for clients
• B. Stateless requests
• C. Use a proprietary protocol in addition to HTTP
• D. Do not use standard HTTP status codes

Answer: (B)

Statelessness is the key idea here: in REST, each client request should be self-contained and not rely on any stored server-side context from previous requests. The server treats every request as independent, so it doesn’t keep you logged in or remember where you left off between calls. This makes the service easier to scale because any server can handle any request without needing shared session data, and clients often include authentication tokens or other state with each request. Maintaining server-side sessions introduces state on the server, which goes against that principle and complicates scalability. Using a proprietary protocol in addition to HTTP would break REST’s uniform interface and interoperability, which rests on standard HTTP. Not using standard HTTP status codes would make it harder for clients to understand and handle responses consistently.

Statelessness is the key idea here: in REST, each client request should be self-contained and not rely on any stored server-side context from previous requests. The server treats every request as independent, so it doesn’t keep you logged in or remember where you left off between calls. This makes the service easier to scale because any server can handle any request without needing shared session data, and clients often include authentication tokens or other state with each request.

Maintaining server-side sessions introduces state on the server, which goes against that principle and complicates scalability. Using a proprietary protocol in addition to HTTP would break REST’s uniform interface and interoperability, which rests on standard HTTP. Not using standard HTTP status codes would make it harder for clients to understand and handle responses consistently.