Roy Thomas Fielding (born 1965) is an American computer scientist, one of the principal authors of the

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

specification and the originator of the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style. He is an authority on

computer network A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...

architecture and co-founded the

Apache HTTP Server The Apache HTTP Server ( ) is a free and open-source cross-platform web server software, released under the terms of Apache License 2.0. Apache is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache So ...

project. Fielding works as a Senior Principal Scientist at

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the crea ...

San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popul ...

Biography

Fielding was born in 1965 in

Laguna Beach, California Laguna Beach (; ''Laguna'', Spanish language, Spanish for "Lagoon") is a seaside resort city located in southern Orange County, California, in the United States. It is known for its mild year-round climate, scenic coves, environmental preservat ...

. He describes himself as "part Maori,

Kiwi Kiwi most commonly refers to: * Kiwi (bird), a flightless bird native to New Zealand * Kiwi (nickname), a nickname for New Zealanders * Kiwifruit, an edible berry * Kiwi dollar or New Zealand dollar, a unit of currency Kiwi or KIWI may also ref ...

, Yank, Irish, Scottish, British, and California beach bum". In 1999, the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

(MIT)

Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...

TR100 The Innovators Under 35 is a peer-reviewed annual award and listicle published by ''MIT Technology Review'' magazine, naming the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35. at ''Technology Review'' with lists of winners at technologyreview.com ...

named him one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. In 2000, he received his doctorate from the

University of California, Irvine The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and pr ...

Contributions

''Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures'', Fielding's doctoral dissertation, describes Representational State Transfer (REST) as a key architectural principle of the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

and received a large amount of attention. Computer engineers frequently hold up REST as an approach to developing web services, as an alternative to other distributed-computing specifications such as

SOAP Soap is a salt of a fatty acid used in a variety of cleansing and lubricating products. In a domestic setting, soaps are surfactants usually used for washing, bathing, and other types of housekeeping. In industrial settings, soaps are use ...

. Fielding has also been heavily involved in the development of

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

and

Uniform Resource Identifier A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a unique sequence of characters that identifies a logical or physical resource used by web technologies. URIs may be used to identify anything, including real-world objects, such as people and places, conc ...

s. Fielding co-founded the

project and was a member of the interim

OpenSolaris OpenSolaris () is a discontinued open-source computer operating system based on Solaris and created by Sun Microsystems. It was also, perhaps confusingly, the name of a project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around th ...

Boards until he resigned from the community in 2008. He chaired the

Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the A ...

for its first three years and sat on its board of directors until May 2014. Between 2001 and 2006, Fielding worked on Waka, an

application protocol An application layer is an abstraction layer that specifies the shared communications protocols and interface methods used by hosts in a communications network. An ''application layer'' abstraction is specified in both the Internet Protocol Su ...

intended as "a binary, token-based replacement for

". It was "designed to match the efficiency of the

REST Rest or REST may refer to: Relief from activity * Sleep ** Bed rest * Kneeling * Lying (position) * Sitting * Squatting position Structural support * Structural support ** Rest (cue sports) ** Armrest ** Headrest ** Footrest Arts and enter ...

architectural style".

References

Bibliography

External links

Fielding's blog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fielding, Roy 1965 births Living people Computer programmers Web developers University of California, Irvine alumni Free software programmers Hypertext Transfer Protocol