What does “state transfer” in Representational State Transfer (REST) refer to?

Question

What does the State Transfer in Representational State Transfer refer to?

Found some explanations about this (e.g. here) but I still don't understand. For example in the article it is said

The representation places the client application in a state.

Why? What does state (as I understand it, something like a session) have to do with a representation of a resource?

Answer 1

Why? What does state (as I understand it, something like a session) have to do with a representation of a resource?

An object has attributes (or state) and behaviors (or methods).

If I want to move an object from my desktop to a server I have to do the following:

1. Create a representation of the state of the object.

2. Transfer that representation from the desktop to the server.

The methods I don't transfer. I install the same class definition on both machines.

So, REST is about creating a representation of the object's current state so it can be transferred to another server from which the object can be reconstructed.

We only send the state -- the attributes -- of the object. And we have to create an external, serialized representation of that state.