The Statelessness means not having any state, REST means Representational State Transfer, which boils down to the same things that the server hosting REST does not store any state about the client session on its side.
Each request from the client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and it cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server. Session state is therefore kept entirely on the client. Client is responsible for storing and handling all application state related information on client side.
To maintain statelessness, one should not store authorization details of client on the server, each request to the server should contain all the required details. As each request is considered to be a new request.
Advantages of REST being Stateless :
- It has drastically reduced the code – by reducing the code of server side snychronization logic.
- East to scale up, as there are no sessions to maintain so any server can handle multiple requests.
- Easy to cache as well.
- Server knows about each request by each client as the client carries all required information with each request, and can be tracked.
- Web services need not maintain the client’s previous interactions.
Summary
In this tutorial we learnt about the statelessness of REST apis and its advantages.
I hope you liked it !